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).