Forest plantation on woody species richness in a mountainous region of Beijing, China

Background/Question/Methods

The role of planted forests in conserving biodiversity is gaining more attention. However, most works on evaluating the forest plantation on diversity focus only on one spatial scale. The main aim of this work is to test the sampling scale effect on forest plantation on diversity. We design a hierarchy sampling strategy to collecting data on woody species diversity from planted pine (Pinus tabuliformis Carr.) forest, planted larch (Larix principis-rupprechtii Mayr.) forest, and natural secondary deciduous broadleaf forest in a mountainous region of Beijing, China. The sampling system includes 4 hierarchy levels: plot, slope position, slope, and watershed. Totally, 270 sampling unit in plot level, 54 sampling unit in slope position level, 18 sampling unit in slope level and 9 sampling unit in watershed level from the 3 forests types are collected for data analysis. The multi-scale additive diversity partitioning approach and the mixed effected model is used to test the effects of plantation on woody species at different sampling levels.

Results/Conclusions

The additive diversity partition analysis shows that compare to nature forest, planted pine forest change the woody diversity partitioning pattern at multi-scales, while planted larch forest does not show difference to natural forest. The results of mixed model show that the alpha component of woody diversity in planted pine forest are significant lower than planted larch forest and natural forest at plot level, slope level and watershed level (alpha1, alpha3, and gamma), while the beta diversity components of planted pine forest only significant lower than planted larch forest and natural forest at plots level (beta1). However, the diversity in the planted larch forest does not show significant difference to natural forests for all diversity components at all sampling levels. Our work finds that the impact of forest plantation on woody species richness is context dependent, species select for plantation and sampling scale selected for data analysis would change the conclusion on the role of forest plantation on diversity. We suggest that a wide range of scales should been taken into account for evaluating the role of forest plantation on diversity.