Potential Carbon Sequestration and Economic Value Assessment of the Relict Plant Ginkgo biloba L. Based on the Maximum Entropy Model

Abstract

As global warming intensifies, plant carbon sequestration is becoming increasingly important. Studies have shown that Ginkgo biloba L. is a kind of tree with a high carbon sequestration capacity and is one of the dominant tree species suitable for urban ecosystems. Predicting the changes in the potential suitable areas, carbon sequestration amount and carbon sink value of G. biloba under current and future climate change will provide some references for the resource utilization of urban green tree species and the realization of carbon sink value. In this study, we used ‘kuenm’, an R package that uses MaxEnt, as a modeling algorithm to predict the potential suitable areas of G. biloba under nine climate scenarios, and the carbon sequestration and the carbon sink values under the fair-value measurement model were calculated. We found that: (1) the optimized MaxEnt model improved the prediction accuracy (AUC = 0.97 ± 0.004) significantly. (2) The total current potential suitable area of G. biloba was 175.11 × 104-km2, representing 21.63% of China’s total territorial area, and the highly suitable area was 26.86 × 104-km2, accounting for 2.83% of China’s total territorial area, concentrated primarily in the regions of Sichuan and Chongqing, southern Jiangsu, and Zhejiang Province. (3) The eight future climate scenarios predict that the suitable area of G. biloba will initially decrease and then increase, and the newly expanded area will be distributed primarily in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River as well as near the estuary of the Yangtze River, while the region suffering losses will move from Sichuan and Chongqing to Hunan, Jiangxi and Zhejiang Province as well. Hf and bio2 are the major factors affecting the distribution of G. biloba. (4) The total annual carbon sequestration of G. biloba was 1.60 × 106-t, 1.50 × 106-t and 1.57 × 106-t under different environmental conditions in the present, the 2050s and the 2090s, respectively. Over these three time periods, we obtained total carbon sequestration values of 5.63 × 107 CNY, 5.28 × 107 CNY and 5.53 × 107 CNY.