Tradeoffs between three forest ecosystem services across the state of New Hampshire, USA: timber, carbon, and albedo

Forests are more frequently being managed to store and sequester carbon for the purposes of climate change mitigation. Generally, this practice involves long-term conservation of intact mature forests and/or reductions in the frequency and intensity of timber harvests. However, incorporating the influence of forest surface albedo often suggests that long rotation lengths may not always be optimal in mitigating climate change in forests characterized by frequent snowfall. To address this, we investigated tradeoffs between three ecosystem services: carbon storage, albedo-related radiative forcing, and timber provisioning. We calculated optimal rotation length at 498 diverse Forest Inventory and Analysis forest sites in the state of New Hampshire, USA. We found that the average optimal rotation lengths across all sites is 94 years (s = 44), with a large cluster of short optimal rotation lengths that were calculated at high elevations in the White Mountain National Forest. Using a regressio...