Abstract:

In southern China, fengshuiforests are distinctive woodlands that are treated as a protective barrier behind rural villages. Likely due to their socio-cultural importance to indigenous people, these forests have been conserved over the past several hundred years and play a significant role in conservation of local biodiversity. To reveal the effects of human disturbance on fengshui forests, we compared the species composition and diversity of understory woody plants among three fengshui forests with similar topographic situation and identical origin under different degrees of disturbance intensity in Dalingshan Town of Dongguan City, Guangdong Province. The low, medium and high disturbance level of fengshui forest stands were identified according to impact factors such as road length, agricultural land, residential area, factory area, cutting degree and garbage cover. Multi-response permutation procedures (MRPP) analysis showed that the composition of understory woody species (P= 0.001, A = 0.3886) differed among forest stands. Meanwhile, the proportion of mesophytes decreased with disturbance and the proportion of heliophytes increased. Though not statistically significant (P> 0.05), diversity indices consistently showed the following trend: high disturbance > medium disturbance > low disturbance. Jaccard coefficients of understory species similarity among the threefengshui stands declined with increasing intensity of human disturbance, indicating that species replacement occurred. Two-way cluster analysis of the relationships between plant species and forest stands indicated that the spatial distribution of understory species differed among stands. Indicator species analysis (ISA) identified species that were indicative (importance value ≥60) of the three forest stands studied, and therefore potential indicators of different disturbance regimes. We conclude that human disturbance of fengshui forests appeared to alter understory species composition, and favor the establishment and growth of heliophytes, but failed to affect species diversity. Furthermore, identification of candidate understory indicators which capture key ecological responses to human disturbance may have significant implications for improving biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management of fengshui forests.

Key words: disturbance, fengshui forest, understory plants, biodiversity conservation, indicator species