Ecological distribution of soil animals in broad-leaved pine forests in southern slope of Xiao Hinggan Mountains

Abstract

This paper studied the soil animals of four type forests of broad-leaved pine forests in the southern slope of the Xiao Hinggan Mountains. The samples were extracted from four forest types in every first week of June, August, October, and every forest type was chosen out three plots. Since there are different soil animals in different depths, every plot was divided into four partitions with the same vertical distance: litter, 0 – 10 cm, 10 – 20 cm, 20 – 30 cm. Using hand sorting out large soil animals, Tullgren method (to middle and small soil animals) and Baermann method (to moist soil animals) to collect soil animals. Among the four type forests, insecta has the largest amount of groups of 54. Oribatida has the most number of individual, which is 1547, occupying 21.73 percent of total collectings. There are 81 groups of soil animals, totalling 7118 belonging to 8 Class 24 Order 57 Family, in which there are 54 groups of big-sized soil animals totalling 2370, 41 groups of middle and small-sized soil animals totalling 4808. Among all the soil animals, their dominant group is 3 ones, usual growp is 14 ones, and rare group is 64 ones. The results show that among the four type forests, the groups of soil animal in Tilia pine forest are much more than the others, with the highest variety index, and the individual number of the soil animals is also very large. The numbers of group and individual in Picea-Abies Pine forest are both small. Among the four forest types, the soil animals in Tilia pine forest are most similar to Betula costata pine forest. There is so little similarity between the soil animals in Picea-Abies pine forest and in the other three forest types.