You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of keystone species and year round food production so that your forest supports other life.
The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology.
We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.
Whenever I hear about planting trees for "carbon sequestration", I immediately remember walking through that forest and thinking how quiet and dead it felt.
The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision.
In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. "It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent."
A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sc...
Azn link for HN Books: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns, pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some. If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest will expand without fundraisers and government programs.
Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in small ways so it can go on to support itself.
I disagree. We also want to avoid ecological cascade effects in our ecosystems.
And perhaps the best way to create a sustainable ecosystem around the trees is to plant them and see what else develops, rather than try and curate a specific balance of organisms.
Geoff Lawton and Sepp Holzer are good people to look into.