By integrating forest inventory data with remotely sensed data, new data layers for factors that affect forest fire potentials were generated for Baihe Forestry Bureau in Jilin Province of China. The principle component analysis was used to sort out the relationships between forest fire potentials and environmental factors. The classifications of these factors were performed with GIS, generating three maps: a fuel-based fire risk map, a topography-based fire risk map, and an anthropogenic-factor fire risk map. These three maps were then synthesized to generate the final fire risk map. The linear regression method was used to analyze the relationship between an area-weighted value of forest fire risks and the frequency of historical forest fires at each forest farm. The results showed that the most important factor contributing to forest fire ignition was topography, followed by anthropogenic factors.
XU Dong, Guofan Shao, DAI Limin, HAO Zhanqing, TANG Lei & WANG Hui Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China
We investigated the effects of climate on Yeddo spruce (Picea jezoensis)radial growth along altitudinal gradients in the subalpine forests of Changbai Mountains using dendroclimatic analyses. Yeddo spruce at its lower and upper distribution limits was more sensitive to the climate. Despite precipitation being generally considered sufficient, we found that precipitation significantly affected Yeddo spruce radial growth. Yeddo spruce at its lower distribution limit was much more affected by precipitation while Yeddo spruce at its upper distribution limit was much more affected by minimum temperature. Yeddo spruce at its medial altitude was affected by sunshine ratio. These results demonstrated that climate affected Yeddo spruce growth differently depending on its altitudinal distributions in the Changbai Mountains. Both temperature and precipitation in the annualization period significantly correlated with Yeddo spruce radial growth. However, warmer signals were not reflected in radial growth trend during the past 20 years because annual total precipitation declined during the same period. It appeared that the climate affected tree rings growth by altering soil moisture availability.
The broadleaved-Korean pine mixed forest is a native vegetation in the Changbai Mountains, northeast China. The probability density functions including the normal, negative exponential, Weibull and finite mixture distribution, were used to describe the diameter distributions of the species groups and entire forest stand. There is a strong correlation between parameters and mean DBH except the shape parameters in the mixture distribution. The diameter classes of species and entire forest stand showed not negative exponential but normal and "S" distribution. The mixture function was better than normal and Weibull to describe the model distribution. The location parameter had an effect on the estimated frequency in the first diameter class, when the estimated location parameter was bigger than the lower limit of the first diameter class.
WANG Shunzhong, DAI Limin, LIU Guohua, YUAN Jianqiong, ZHANG Hengmin & WANG Qingli Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China