The climate change effects on boreal forests are more obvious than on other terrestrial ecosystems, and it is estimated that the temperature in boreal forests might rise at twice the rate of other ecosystems. It was shown that climate warming and changes in precipitation patterns can lead to changes in aboveground biomass and tree species composition of boreal forests. However, uncertainty in climate change prediction leads to large uncertainties in the prediction of biomass and tree species composition, which would be a challenge for forest managers to formulate measures to enhance the adaptation of forests to climate change impacts.  

In view of this, Assistant Prof. Huang Chao, Prof. Liang Yu and their colleagues at the Landscape Process Group of the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE), Chinese Academy of Sciences, adopted a combined (LANDIS PRO and LINKAGES) model to simulate the changes in biomass and tree species composition of a boreal forest in China under different atmospheric circulation and greenhouse gas emission scenarios in the 21st century, and quantified the sensitivity of these variables to climate change.  

The results clearly showed that the uncertainty in the prediction of temperature and precipitation could cause great variations in biomass and tree species composition when evaluating the responses of boreal forests to climate change. In addition, the researchers found that aboveground biomass of the boreal forest is more sensitive to changes in precipitation than temperature. Moreover, the response of trees to changes in temperature and precipitation is species-specific, indicating that one needs to run certain statistics first to quantify and reduce uncertainty of climate change prediction before estimating climate change impacts on forest ecosystems with the Atmospheric Circulation Models (GCMS). 

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Key R&D Project. The results were published in Ecological Modelling, entitled "Sensitivity of aboveground biomass and species composition to climate change in boreal forests of Northeastern China."