Spatiotemporal dynamics of forest ecosystem carbon budget in Guizhou: customisation and application of the CBM-CFS3 model for China

BACKGROUND: Countries seeking to mitigate climate change through forests require suitable modelling approaches to predict carbon (C) budget dynamics in forests and their responses to disturbance and management. The Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3) is a feasible and comprehensive tool for simulating forest C stock dynamics across broad levels, but discrepancies remain to be addressed in China. Taking Guizhou as the case study, we customised the CBM-CFS3 model according to China’s context, including the modification of aboveground biomass C stock algorithm, addition of C budget accounting for bamboo forests, economic forests, and shrub forests, improvement of non-forest land belowground slow dead organic matter (DOM) pool initialisation, and other model settings. RESULTS: The adequate linear relationship between the estimated and measured C densities (R(2) = 0.967, P < 0.0001, slope = 0.904) in the model validation demonstrated the high accuracy and reliability of our customised model. We further simulated the spatiotemporal dynamics of forest C stocks and disturbance impacts in Guizhou for the period 1990–2016 using our customised model. Results shows that the total ecosystem C stock and C density, and C stocks in biomass, litter, dead wood, and soil in Guizhou increased continuously and significantly, while the soil C density decreased over the whole period, which could be attributed to deforestation history and climate change. The total ecosystem C stock increased from 1220 Tg C in 1990 to 1684 Tg C in 2016 at a rate of 18 Tg C yr(−1), with significant enhancement in most areas, especially in the south and northwest. The total decrease in ecosystem C stock and C expenditure caused by disturbances reached 97.6 Tg C and 120.9 Tg C, respectively, but both represented significant decreasing trends owing to the decline of disturbed forest area during 1990–2016. Regeneration logging, deforestation for agriculture, and harvest logging caused the largest C stock decrease and C expenditure, while afforestation and natural expansion of forest contributed the largest increases in C stock. CONCLUSIONS: The forests in Guizhou were a net carbon sink under large-scale afforestation throughout the study period; Our customised CBM-CFS3 model can serve as a more effective and accurate method for estimating forest C stock and disturbance impacts in China and further enlightens model customisation to other areas. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13021-022-00210-0.