Also, to conduct what can truly be called a life-cycle analysis, one must look at the life of the tree before it was logged — what I term "pre-extraction". To examine this fully, one must again separate the ecosystem from which the tree is being extracted, as to whether it is a human-managed plantation, a second-growth recovering forest, or an old-growth forest that's been growing, largely without major disturbance, for hundreds — or hundreds of thousands — of years. This is where it gets really difficult for the purpose of performing an LCA. Not only is there a vast spectrum of situations running from one end of those different systems to the other, but this factor is then multiplied, perhaps thousands of times, by additional factors of spatial conditions. For instance, is that forest or plantation in a boreal ecosystem in, say, Kamchatka, Russia, near the Arctic circle, on a mountainside or is it in a tropical ecosystem in, say, Yaounde, Cameroon, in a lowland near the equator, underpinned with peat. What is the altitude of that group of trees? What amount of rainfall is typical there? What soil conditions exist, in terms of nutrient cycling? Is that place a fire-driven ecosystem that has recently burned? If it's a natural forest, how long has it been since a major disturbance, which can encompass any number of occurrences, from landslides to storms, volcanic eruptions, or insect or pathogenic events? Any of these can be a significant factor in that forest's or plantation's current carbon stock and the speed of post-harvest carbon re-sequestration.
All of these factors can determine how much carbon was in that ecosystem historically and currently, and the percentages of that carbon that are in the trees, in the soil, in the leaf litter, and in the branches.