Larger Forest Patches Have Greater Per-Area Productivity
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03075-5 <-- shared paper
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08688-7 <-- shared related paper
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https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2002)052[0411:FFOTCU]2.0.CO;2 <-- shared related paper
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H/T @Thomas W. Crowther | Professor of Ecology
“[Their] new study… shows that fragmentation limits the carbon storage in the forests that are still standing, and these indirect effects could be just as big as the direct impacts of forest clearing.
When you imagine a large forest patch, you instinctively know it is just fundamentally different from a smaller one. The small patch is often dry and disturbed with fewer animals in the canopy, while the middle of a large forest area contains moist understory plants and rich soil carbon stocks. The bigger patch just contains so much more life.
By studying 17 million forest patches, [the author’s] calculations have revealed that a hectare of forest embedded in a 1,000 km patch is 38% more productive than the same hectare would be if it were standing alone.
The implications are pretty staggering. It means that cutting such a large forest into many hectare-sized patches would reduce total carbon storage by 38%, even if the total area remained exactly the same. And indeed, it has the same effect on carbon capture as if you simply removed 38% of the forest area.
Across the USA, fragmentation has already reduced total forest productivity by about 14%, relative to same forest area if it had been existing in a contiguous state.
To improve the health of our forests, it is not enough to stop the clearing of natural land, we also need to prevent the fragmentation of these magical ecological systems so they can keep our planetary system going…”
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“Forest fragmentation could reduce carbon sequestration beyond losses caused by declining forest area alone, if smaller patches are intrinsically less productive per unit area than larger ones. Here [they] analyse[d] 17 million forest patches across the conterminous USA and show that per-area net primary productivity increases systematically with patch size. A hectare embedded within a ~100,000 km² forest is, on average, 38% more productive than an isolated hectare under comparable environmental conditions. Counterfactual analyses indicate that existing fragmentation has already reduced total annual forest productivity across the conterminous USA by 0.16 GtC/yr or 14% relative to an upper-bound configuration of large, contiguous forests. Random forest models identify patch size as a stronger predictor of net primary productivity than topographic and soil variables. Extending the analysis globally with coarser-resolution data, [they found a] consistent positive relationships between patch size and per-area productivity for both net and gross primary productivity. These results demonstrate that forest fragmentation can reduce carbon sequestration without net forest-area loss, highlighting the need to account for fragmentation—not just forest cover—in climate mitigation strategies…”
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