Abstract:

The paper aims to explore the influence of topography on the pattern of vegetation on landscape scale. Based on the investigation of a large number of forest communities at Dalaoling Mountain in the Three Gorges, 7 indexes were used to figure out the topographical characteristics of habitats. The topographical pattern of different communities were analyzed with detrended canonical correspondence analysis (DCCA) ordination, and the influence of topographical factors, spatial factors and their interaction on the total variance of vegetative pattern were quantitatively partitioned. The results suggested that, the contribution of the 3 aspects is 9.50%, 5.94% and 6.81%, respectively. Topography shows dominant controlling effect on the vegetative pattern at Dalaoling. But 77.75% of the variance were not interpreted yet.

Key words: Dalaoling in the Three Gorges, spatial pattern of vegetation, topographic interpretation, canonical correspondence analysis, ordination