Prioritizing forestation in China through incorporating biogeochemical and local biogeophysical effects

A database of plot-scale forest type and forest biomass was constructed by integrating four existing databases: the Forest Carbon Database (ForC) (Anderson-Teixeira et al., 2018), the Forest Observation System (FOS) (Schepaschenko D et al., 2019), a fieldwork database established by Zhu et al. (2017), and datasets collected by Ye et al. (2021). These four existing databases provide information on geographic location (latitude and longitude), dominant species or forest types, stand age, and aboveground or belowground biomass or biomass carbon stock. It should be noted that sites in the ForC dataset may consist of multiple different plots. In this case, (1) if the plots shared both the same forest type and the same stand age, the reported observations were averaged; (2) otherwise, if they shared the same forest type but had different stand ages, then they were treated as different entries; (3) if their forest types were different, then, again, they were treated as different entries. Following this procedure, to ensure the consistency of the constructed database in this study, forest types were classified into coniferous, broad-leaved, and mixed forests based on the information on dominant species and forest types contained in these four databases. In addition, biomass density (in Mg ha-1) was converted to biomass carbon density (in Mg C ha-1) using the conversion factor of 0.5 (Petersson et al., 2012). The above processing generated a database containing information on geographic location, forest types, stand age, and aboveground or belowground biomass carbon density, consisting of 3411 observations.

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