In the context of assessing the carbon balance of forest operations, one should keep a holistic approach.  It’s extremely important to pay attention to the boundaries of the system. Indeed, what happens at stand level should not be extrapolated to the whole of the forest. As shown in the figure below, the carbon stored in the forest vary quite drastically when considering only a fraction of the forest (left), while the trends are much smoother at forest level (right).   Furthermore, recent research shows that, during the development of unmanaged part of the forest, many trees die because of competition (natural process), no matter the quality of the site they’re located in or the species they belong to. Forest stands that were aged between 100 and 150 years could lose up to 40% of their total volume because of competition induced mortality (Pretzsch et al., 2023).