Quantifying the response of forest carbon balance to future climate change in Northeastern China: Model validation and prediction

In this study, we report on the validation of process-based forest growth and carbon and nitrogen model of TRIPLEX against observed data, and the use of the model to investigate the potential impacts and interaction of climate change and increasing atmospheric CO2 on forest net primary productivity (NPP) and carbon budgets in northeast of China. The model validation results show that the simulated tree total volume, NPP, total biomass and soil carbon are consistent with observed data across the Northeast of China, demonstrating that the improved TRIPLEX model is able to simulate forest growth and carbon dynamics of the boreal and temperate forest ecosystems at regional scale. The climate change would increase forest NPP and biomass carbon but decrease overall soil carbon under all three climate change scenarios. The combined effects of climate change and CO2 fertilization on the increase of NPP were estimated to be 10–12% for 2030s and 28–37% in 2090s. The simulated effects of CO2 fertilization significantly offset the soil carbon loss due to climate change alone. Overall, future climate change and increasing atmospheric CO2 would have a significant impact on the forest ecosystems of Northeastern China.