Aboveground carbon contents and storage of three major Taiwanese conifer species.

Abstract

This research presents estimations of the aboveground carbon storage of 3 major Taiwanese conifer species: Taiwan red cypress (Chamaecyparis formosensis Matsum.), Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica D. Don), and China fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata (Lamb.) Hook.). The percent carbon content (PCC) of the biomass of different tree portions was determined for these species. We found that the PCC was higher in the foliage of all species, while the PCC in other portions of the trees varied with tree species, and the mean PCC of trees increased with the diameter class for both Taiwan red cypress and China fir. At the tree level, using the method based on determining the PCC of different tree portions (the PCC method) and the conventional method (using 50% as the carbon content) to estimate carbon storage of trees revealed significant differences for all species by the t-test for paired comparisons. The conventional method showed higher estimates of carbon storage than the PCC method by 3.96, 1.83 and 0.89% for Taiwan red cypress, Japanese cedar, and China fir, respectively. A allometric models were developed to estimate the carbon storage of the 3 species based on the diameter at breast height (DBH). Moreover, the transformation coefficients between the volume and aboveground carbon storage of trees by a linear regression model were 309.05, 274.33 and 190.34 kg m^(-3) for Taiwan red cypress, Japanese cedar, and China fir, respectively.