Context

Afforestation is one of the major drivers of land cover change in the world. In spite of its multiple applications, forest generation has been fostered during the last century to achieve few specific objectives such as timber production or catchment erosion protection. However, new afforestation programs are required to meet multiple objectives such as carbon sequestration, reducing environmental risks and enhance biodiversity conservation to reach sustainability.

Objectives

Assessing the general efficiency of past large-scale afforestation programs on the provision of ecosystem services (ES) and other socio-ecological attributes. We also determined whether this efficiency depended on the type of ecosystem used for comparison.

Methods

We carried out a semi-quantitative meta-analysis from 75 studies analyzing the effects of 128 afforestation actions developed in one of the EU countries with larger areas of afforested land during the twentieth century.

Results

Spanish afforestation policy improved timber provision and carbon sequestration. However, our results show that afforestation programs did not enhance regulating ES when compared to natural land plots, but only when compared to highly degraded areas prior to restoration actions.

Conclusions

Large-scale afforestations have difficulties in assuring the provisioning of regulating ES and the conservation of biodiversity when only productivity criteria are prioritized. Our results suggest the need for an afforestation agenda that embraces more comprehensive landscape management approaches that allow reducing undesired ES trade-offs while getting multiple objectives from different ecosystems.

中文翻译：

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为生态系统服务提供大规模造林：汲取过去以改善未来

语境

造林是世界土地覆盖变化的主要驱动力之一。尽管有多种应用，但在上个世纪促进了森林生成，但几乎没有实现木材生产或集水区侵蚀保护等特定目标。然而，需要新的植树造林计划来实现碳固存、降低环境风险和加强生物多样性保护等多重目标，以实现可持续性。

目标

评估过去大规模造林计划在提供生态系统服务 (ES) 和其他社会生态属性方面的总体效率。我们还确定了这种效率是否取决于用于比较的生态系统类型。

方法

我们对 75 项研究进行了半定量荟萃分析，分析了 20 世纪在欧盟国家之一的造林土地面积较大的国家开展的 128 项造林行动的影响。

结果

西班牙的植树造林政策改善了木材供应和碳固存。然而，我们的结果表明，与自然地块相比，植树造林计划并没有增强调节 ES，而只是与恢复行动之前的高度退化区域相比。

结论

当仅优先考虑生产力标准时，大规模造林难以确保提供调节性生态系统和保护生物多样性。我们的结果表明，需要一个包含更全面的景观管理方法的植树造林议程，以减少不希望的 ES 权衡，同时从不同的生态系统中获得多个目标。