Abstract
Two methods were employed to find spatial regularity in a complicated mountain landscape of Beijing, China on the basis of functional and structural affinities. The first approach applied Affinity Analysis based on species composition to landscape. The mosaic diversity of the landscape was 3.5298>3, which means the study landscape is complex and controlled by multiple environmental gradients. These landscape types were divided into 3 parts according to the mean affinity values of 0.2143 and 0.7857 (0.5±1 SD). Modal sites are the central types of the landscape, which include a zonal broad-leaved forest of the region and a conifer plantation replacing the former. Outliers are found in the highest altitude and the lowest, both have few species in common with the above two modal types. The remaining landscape types are intermediate sites, which are transitional between modals and outliers, broadly distributed throughout mountain environments. Neighbor types have more species in common than those more widely separated, which probably distributed adjacently in space or in similar quality habitat. The other method employed is the new TWINSPAN analysis by substituting spatial neighboring data of landscape types for species composition data. It clearly divided the landscape types into three groups, i.e., subalpine, middle and low mountain groups, which were correlated with altitude, as well as influenced by human disturbance. The new TWINSPAN classification method is more reliable in finding spatial gradient of patchy landscapes than affinity analysis; however, affinity analysis is useful in finding species diversity pattern and the importance of landscape types in a region. Integrating advantages of the two methods could supply complete and reliable information on how landscape types are distributed in space, which environmental gradient dominates the spatial distribution of the landscape types, as well as where important and unusual types are located.
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Ma, KM., Fu, BJ., Guo, XD. et al. Finding spatial regularity in mosaic landscapes: two methods integrated. Plant Ecology 149, 195–205 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026599928138
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026599928138