A 100-year conservation experiment: Impacts on forest carbon stocks and fluxes

Forest conservation is an important climate change mitigation strategy. National parks in Canada’s Rocky and Purcell Mountains offer a rare opportunity to evaluate the impacts of a century of conservation on forest carbon (C) stocks and fluxes. We studied forest ecosystem C dynamics of three national parks in the Rocky and Purcell Mountains of British Columbia – Yoho, Kootenay, and Glacier National Parks – over the period 1970–2008 using the CBM-CFS3 inventory-based forest C budget model. We hypothesized that parks and protected areas would contain higher forest C density and have lower CO2 uptake rates compared to their surrounding reference areas because of the exclusion of timber harvesting and resulting predominance of older, slower growing forest stands. Results for Glacier National Park relative to its reference area were consistent with our hypothesis. Forests in Kootenay National Park were substantially younger than those in its reference area despite the exclusion of harvesting because natural disturbances affected large areas within the park over the past century. Site productivity in Kootenay National Park was also generally higher in the park than in its reference area. Consequently, Kootenay National Park had both higher C density and higher CO2 uptake than its reference area. Yoho National Park forests were similar in age to reference area forests and more productive, and therefore had both higher C stocks and greater CO2 uptake. C density was higher in all 3 parks compared to their surrounding areas, and parks with younger forests than reference areas had higher CO2 uptake. The results of this study indicate that forest conservation in protected areas such as national parks can preserve existing C stocks where natural disturbances are rare. Where natural disturbances are an important part of the forest ecology, conservation may or may not contribute to climate change mitigation because of the risk of C loss in the event of wildfire or insect-caused tree mortality. Anticipated increases in natural disturbance resulting from global warming may further reduce the climate change mitigation potential of forest conservation in disturbance-prone ecosystems. We show that managing for the ecological integrity of landscapes can also have carbon mitigation co-benefits.