Stand Age and Climate Change Effects on Carbon Increments and Stock Dynamics
Carbon assimilation and wood production are influenced by environmental conditions and endogenous factors, such as species auto-ecology, age, and hierarchical position within the forest structure. Disentangling the intricate relationships between those factors is more pressing than ever due to climate change’s pressure. Yet, our understanding of how future climate will interact with forests of different ages is particularly limited, and only a few studies have explored this relationship under changing climate conditions. We employed a validated process-based forest model for simulating undisturbed forests of different ages under five climate change scenarios coming from five Earth System Models. In this context, carbon stocks and increment were simulated via total carbon woody stocks (MgC ha-1) and the mean annual increment (m3 ha-1year-1), which depend mainly on age and long-term processes, such as climate trends. We find greater differences among different age cohorts under the same