Abstract:

The Krascheninnikovia compacta community is primarily distributed in extremely cold and arid high-altitude environments typically inaccessible to humans. It represents the most common and widely distributed type of vegetation in the alpine deserts of the Qingzang Plateau. Most investigations into this community take the form of qualitative descriptions, which fail to provide precious sample data. In order to generate a community dataset of K. compacta, this paper recorded and organized the spatial distribution, community characteristics and structure, and climate characteristics of this species based on field survey data collected in 2018, 2019, and 2022, along with a description of the relevant literature. The results showed that: (1) Krascheninnikovia compacta community was mainly found in the Central Kunlun Mountains of the Qingzang Plateau, the Northern Tianshan Mountains, the Altun Mountains, and the Dangjin Mountains Pass. (2) Krascheninnikovia compacta community had the relatively low values in community height, coverage, biomass and species richness. Our study identified 29 species of seed plants belonging to 11 families and 22 genera distributed among 22 typical plots. Hemicryptophytes were the dominant life form, with a total of 18 species, which accounted for 62.07% of all plants and primarily consisted of perennial grasses and perennial weeds. (3) The community structure was relatively simple due to only K. compacta having a consistent presence of more than 50% of all species. There were several subdominant species but mostly companion species and occasional species (93.10%) residing in the shrub layer and herb layer. (4) The vertical structure of the community can be divided into two layers. The first layer consists of a sparse cushioned small semi-shrub dominated by K. compacta, and the second layer consists of a sparse herb layer. (5) The growth environment of this community was characterized by a cold climate and little precipitation that is concentrated in the warmest quarter of the alpine desert climate. This dataset is the only known dataset describing the K. compacta community in China. It represents a valuable resource for studying the species composition and structure of the K. compacta community. The information regarding the geographic climate and community species in the dataset provides basic data for future investigation of Krascheninnikovia compacta community and compilation of Vegegraphy of China.

Key words: Krascheninnikovia compacta, spatial distribution, community characteristics, diversity