Planted Forests Greened 7% Slower Than Natural Forests in Southern China Over the Past Forty Years
Forests have seen a strong greening trend worldwide, and previous studies have attributed this mainly to land-use conversions such as afforestation. However, for the greening of existing forests, the role of human interventions is unclear. Here we paired neighboring natural and planted forests in Southern China to minimize the differences between the forest types and analyzed the vegetation index