Landscape change on burned blanks in Daxing's Mountains

Abstract

Daxing'an Mountains was one of the most important forest areas in China, but it was also an area which was prone to suffering forest fire. The catastrophic forest fire that occurred in Daxing'an Mountains on May 6, 1987 devastated more than 1.33×106 hm2 of natural forests, which leaded to the formation of some mosaic areas with different burn intensities. Two forest farms of Tuqiang Forest Bureau (124°05′–122°18′E, 53°34′–52°15′N) were chosen as a typical area to analyze the post-fire landscape change by drawing and comparing the two digital forest stand maps of 1987 and 2000. The landscape lands of forest were classified into 12 types: coniferous forest, broadleaf forest, needle-broadleaf mixed forest, shrub, nursery, harvested area, burned blanks, agricultural land, swamp, water, built-up, grass. The results showed that: 1) The burned blanks was almost restored, some of them mainly converted into broadleaf forest land during the process of natural restoration, and coniferous forest land by the artificial reforestation, and the others almost changed into swamp or grass land; 2) The proportion of forest area increased from 47.6% in 1987 to 81.3% in 2002. Therefore, a few management countermeasures, such as the enhancing people's consciousness of fire-proofing and constructing species diversity, were put forward for forest sustainable development.