ABOVE: Multispecies forests generally outperform monocultures in productivity and carbon accumulation.
YUANYUAN HUANG
The paper
Y. Huang et al., “Impacts of species richness on productivity in a large-scale subtropical forest experiment,” Science, 362:80–83, 2018.
Plants can help mitigate climate change by removing and storing carbon from the atmosphere. Bernhard Schmid, an ecologist and environmental scientist at the University of Zurich, and others have published observational research suggesting that, in forests, higher species richness is associated with higher carbon sequestration. But it wasn’t clear whether the relationship was causal, Schmid says.
To explore the issue experimentally, Schmid and colleagues in Germany and China enlisted the help of farmers in southeast China’s Jiangxi Province to plant nearly 160,000 trees on small plots such that each plot contained between 1 and 16 species. After eight years, the 16-species plots had accumulated more than twice the amount of carbon that the average single-species plots had. ...
