2.4.2 Compare the coupling relationships between climate, forest structure, environmental factors, stability, and productivity in natural and planted forests
We used “piecewiseSEM” package (Lefcheck, 2016) to match Structural equation modeling (SEM) to uncover the effects of all explaining variables on forest stability and productivity in planted and natural forests. We concentrated the SEM analysis on diversity-productivity, forest structure-productivity, and climatic-stability relationships. To inspect whether forest structure factors, climatic factors, and environmental factors simultaneously affect trees species diversity, we also fitted paths between structural factors, climatic and environmental factors, and diversity. Standardized path coefficients were used to measure the coupling effects of predictors. All analyses were performed in R v4.0.2 (R Core Team, 2018).