Abstract

Building the stratified uneven-aged mixed forest and promoting the natural recruitment is an important way to realize the sustainable management of forest. This study is to characterize the variation discipline of growth of natural recruitment in different size gaps in 50 years old Chinese pine Plantation as well as its community structure and spatial pattern. All recruitment individuals were measured and stem-mapped in plots and the growth indexes were quantified in different size gaps and under the canopy as well as spatial pattern of recruitment. Ripley’s K-function was selected to analyze spatial pattern of recruitment and spatial association between recruit cohorts in different development stages. Results were showed as following: (1) the proportion of Chinese pine in the natural recruitment community was all higher than 95% in gaps and under the canopy. (2) With the increase of gap size, the recruit density dropped off, whereas the average height, basal stem and age of recruit increased. Gaps enhanced the recruit density and improved the growth of recruit. However, gaps improvement will not fundamentally solve the problem of slow growth speed, low lifetime and maladjusted age structure. (3) The recruitment of Chinese pine was exhibited aggregation at research scales. Intraspecific competition and adult trees were showed with little effort on recruitment. The role of improving the recruitment by gaps was limited under the existing management technology system. Therefore, it is necessary to apply human disturbance to promote the recruitment. To introduce other tree species by human should be attempted. The effort of gaps created by more intensify disturbance and various disturbance frequency ought to be explored so as to find out the most effective interference measurements.

Keywords:

Gaps, plantation, recruitment, Ripley, spatial pattern,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.