Keywords
forest environment
leaf
sapling
spatial pattern
How to Cite
Abstract
The spatial patterns of canopy leaves of saplings of four woody species in a natural secondary forest of northeastern China were analyzed. Four saplings displayed leaf area in higher layers with larger positive inclination angles more than that of the other layers. However, this proportion declined gradually along with descending sapling height, and the leaf area with smaller inclination angles gradually increased. Along the gradient of azimuth angle, the frequency distribution patterns of the leaves of four saplings were irregular and stochastic to some extent. The leaf area density curves of two saplings were parabola-shaped along the gradient of sapling height, and in the middle layers the leaf area densities were higher than those of lower and top layers in sequence. Applying the formulae of Levins (1968) and Shannon and Weaver (1949), as well as the formulae of Schoener (1970) and Pianka (1974), the characteristics of leaf populations of four saplings distributed along the gradients of inclination and azimuth angles, were further analyzed. The significance of these adaptive characteristics in understanding the dynamic properties and regeneration process of the forest community are discussed.
Open Access and Copyright Notice
Selbyana is committed to real and immediate open access for academic work. All of Selbyana's articles and reviews are free to access immediately upon publication. There are no author charges (APCs) prior to publication, and no charges for readers to download articles and reviews for their own scholarly use. To facilitate this, Selbyana depends on the financial backing of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, the hard work and dedication of its editorial team and advisory board, and the continuing support of its network of peer reviewers and partner institutions.
Authors are free to choose which open license they would like to use for their work. Our default license is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). While Selbyana’s articles can be copied by anyone for noncommercial purposes if proper credit is given, all materials are published under an open-access license with authors retaining full and permanent ownership of their work. The author grants Selbyana a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish the work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes to achieve broader impact and visibility.
Authors are responsible for and required to ascertain that they are in possession of image rights for any and all photographs, illustrations, and figures included in their work or to obtain publication or reproduction rights from the rights holders. Contents of the journal will be registered with the Directory of Open Access Journals and similar repositories. Authors are encouraged to store their work elsewhere, for instance in institutional repositories or personal websites, including commercial sites such as academia.edu, to increase circulation (see The Effects of Open Access).