Table 1.

Types of land use and land use change in southern China.

	Type	Management	Tree plantation/harvest intensitya	Tree cover (%)b	Forest loss (%)b	Mean C density (Mg C ha−1)c	Net C sink (Pg C year−1)/% contributionc
1	Dense forest	Persistent, often protected old forests	Very low/very low	56 ± 14	2.8 ± 7	105 ± 11	0.005/4%
2	Forest	Persistent, semi-managed	Low/low	44 ± 16	3 ± 8	75 ± 16	0.023/20%
3	Non-forest	Persistent, for example, farmland, sugarcane and fruit trees	Low/low	14 ± 12	0.7 ± 3.4	22 ± 16	0.032/28%
4	Recovery	Non-forest to forest (slow)	Medium/none	28 ± 15	0.5 ± 2.5	47 ± 12	0.016/14%
5	Afforestation	Non-forest to forest (fast)	Very high/very low	27 ± 14	0.8 ± 3.3	44 ± 12	0.021/18%
6	Deforestation	Forest to non-forest	None/very high	40 ± 16	12 ± 17	64 ± 13	−0.00007/−0.06%
7	Rotation	Medium-scale forestry, changes between forest and non-forest	High/high	32 ± 16	4 ± 10	53 ± 11	0.017/15%
8	RotationL	Large-scale forestry, low recovery	Low/very high	37 ± 15	9 ± 15	61 ± 11	0.0008/0.8%

Dense forest, forest and non-forest are land use types with minor disturbances. The other types include land that experienced changes between forest and non-forest. The percentage of tree cover in each land use type (±standard deviation) is from a Landsat-based tree-cover map in 2010²⁶. Forest loss is also derived from²⁶ and represents the average forest loss per 500-m grid (±standard deviation) from 2000 to 2017. Mean C density and net C sequestration are from our MODIS-based estimates from 2002 to 2017 (±RMSE from calibration biomass data as measure for spatial uncertainty, Supplementary Table 3). See Supplementary Figs. 1–6 for illustrations and Supplementary Table 2 for more details

^aSee Supplementary Fig. 7

^bTaken from ref. ²⁶

^cMODIS estimates 2002–2017 (see Methods)