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Effects of natural and artificial disturbance on landscape and forest structure in Tiantong National Forest Park, East China

  • Special Feature: Original Paper
  • Landscape change and sustainable development in Yangtze River Basin, China
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Abstract

This paper aims to understand the ecological effects of disturbance on broadleaved evergreen forest in East China. We used a manipulative field experiment approximating the common natural and artificial disturbance types in this area to investigate the community physiognomy, floristic composition, and 5-year recovery dynamics of the post-disturbance forest community. The results indicated that the landscape and forest structure have degraded into shrub communities, structure-damaged evergreen broadleaved communities, and so on. The post-disturbance communities presented different means of plant recruitment and vegetation recovery patterns at an early successional stage. The recovery of disturbed forests primarily depended on external seed sources and re-sprouting from stumps, rather than on soil seed banks, as few buried seeds were found. Re-sprouting thus appears to be key in allowing rapid vegetation recovery in evergreen broadleaved forest. Disturbances seem to be one of the most important factors that can contribute to regional species coexistence across temporal and spatial scales in evergreen broadleaved forests.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all memberships of Urban Ecology and Vegetation Engineering Laboratory in East China Normal University for field assistance. We would like to thank Anne Bjorkman at the University of British Columbia for her assistance with English language and grammatical editing of the manuscript. We also owe much gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This research was supported in part by The State’s eleventh 5-year “211 Project”-supported key academic discipline program of ECNU, The National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 30700094), and the Academic Frontier Joint Research Center, Tokyo University of Information Sciences, which is funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Japan).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science, East China Normal University, No. 3663 North Zhongshan Road, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Kan-Kan Shang, Qi-Ping Zhang & Liang-Jun Da

  2. Tiantong National Station of Forest Ecosystem, Ningbo, 315114, Zhejiang, China

    Liang-Jun Da

  3. Shanghai Key Laboratory for Ecology of Urbanization Process and Eco-Restoration, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Liang-Jun Da

  4. Tokyo University of Information Sciences, Chiba, 265-8501, Japan

    Keitarou Hara, Mizuki Tomita & Yi Zhao

  5. Faculty of Urban Construction and Environmental Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400045, China

    Yong-Chuan Yang

  6. Hyogo Prefectural University, Hyogo, 673-1494, Japan

    Michiro Fujihara

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  1. Kan-Kan Shang
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Correspondence to Liang-Jun Da.

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Shang, KK., Zhang, QP., Da, LJ. et al. Effects of natural and artificial disturbance on landscape and forest structure in Tiantong National Forest Park, East China. Landscape Ecol Eng 10, 163–172 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11355-010-0148-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11355-010-0148-6

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