Spatial distribution pattern and scale effect of secondary forests in Daxing'anling, China

Abstract

We examined the spatial distribution patterns and their scale effects of different tree species (Larix gmelinii, Betula platyphylla and others) and different size classes of trees (1-5) of natural L. gmelinii secondary forest (LF), natural B. platyphylla secondary forest (BF) and the mixed secondary forest of both species (MF) in Daxing'anling. The results showed that among the three forest types, LF was the only one type reaching a good state of regeneration, while other two forest types were poorly regenerated. For different forest types, the abundance of seedlings and saplings in the regeneration layer were significantly different from that of the tree layer, and the diameter distribution (except for LF and BF) and height distribution of trees in each forest type were not reasonable, indicating that all the three forest types belonged to unstable communities. At species level, the spatial distributions of main species in each plot were mainly clumped. The five indicators used in this study varied significantly with the scales, which mainly focused on the linear increases (40%), the power increases (22%) and the negative quadratic polynomials (20%), respectively. For different size classes, significant clumped distributions were observed for the regeneration levels (1-3), while the spatial distribution of tree layers (4-5) usually fluctuated distinctly among various distribution patterns. The scale effects of different size classes were mainly dominated by the linear increases (44%), the power increases (15%) and the negative quadratic polynomials (12%). For each forest type and sampling scale, the cluster degrees of trees decreased significantly with increasing tree sizes. Within each forest type, the pattern size of non-dominant species was significantly larger than that of dominant species, while the pattern size of regeneration layers was significantly larger than that of tree layers.