Your criteria are shared by countless homeowners wanting to landscape their yards (fast growing, long-lived, low maintenance). Unfortunately, there are physiological tradeoffs involved, whereby fast growing trees tend to "live fast" in other ways, too, and hence are as a general rule not long-lived. Think about the way forest succession works: fast growing trees fill in gaps quickly, reproducing before the competition catches up; slow growing trees are the shade tolerant ones, coming up underneath the fast growing pioneers and eventually supplanting them.
From what I have read of carbon sequestration (as it is not my primary area of knowledge), old-growth forests hold a lot of carbon, but do not take it up quickly; the decomposition of old trees and the carbon uptake of growing trees about cancel out, making the old-growth forest approximately carbon-neutral. Young forests take up carbon quickly, but as they age, the uptake rate slows down. When a tree decomposes, all the carbon sequestered in its biomass is re-released. So to have effective sequestration, you would have to have a steady supply of young trees taking up carbon, without a concurrent stream of decomposing trees. Net growth would have to exceed net decomposition. In other words, the only long-term way to counteract ever-increasing CO2 emissions, is to have ever-increasing acreage of forest. Jason Hernandez ________________________________ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:59:02 -0800 From: Stephen Johnson <pseud8c...@yahoo.com> Subject: best tree species for carbon sequestration dear Ecolog-ers, I am designing a tree planting-planting project designed to counter CO2 production at a college in south central Iowa. Students will be involved in planting. I have heard that Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) and sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) are both good candidates for carbon sequestration an I wonder if there is any primary literature that backs the claim. Also are there any other tree species with high rates of carbon uptake and biomass accumulation, fast growing and long-lived and with low maintenance and perhaps with any or all of these properties reflected in any scientific studies. Dr. Stephen R. Johnson Freelance Plant Ecologist/Botanist pseud8c...@yahoo.com
