Status of Community Structure and Regeneration of Quercus semecarpifolia S.M. in Forest of Chandragiri Hills, Central Nepal

Abstract

Plants grow in community and community is none other than a naturally occurring, mutually sustaining and interacting assemblage of plants and animals living in the same environment and fixing, utilizing and transferring energy in some manner. To sustain the forest ecology, the role of regeneration is very crucial and good regeneration is the symbol of the healthy forest. The higher elevation of the Chandragiri Hills is mainly dominated by Q. semecarpifolia and this forest was heavily degraded due to over exploitation and fire in the past but now the forest of is protected and managed by the local communities under community forestry program of Nepal. At present, the forest is assumed to be re-growing but its regeneration abilities are unknown. So, this study aimed to explore the community structure and regeneration status of Q. semecarpifolia in four aspects of forest i.e. northern, southern, eastern and western along with effects of microsite conditions such as canopy cover, herb cover, litter thickness and soil attributes on the regeneration of Q. semecarpifolia. The methods used in this study were data collection by systematic random sampling, herbarium preparation and identification, soil collection, soil test and data analysis using some statistical tools like Excel 16, R version and SPSS 25. Altogether, 24 tree species and 98 herb species were recorded. Q. semecarpifolia was dominant tree. The northern aspect was found to be the highest tree species diversity holding aspect while southern aspect was the lowest tree species diversity holding aspect. Regeneration of all tree species and Q. semecarpifolia was good in all aspects of forest but regeneration of Q. semecarpifolia in lower elevation of study area was poor. The microsite conditions had no significant relation with regeneration i.e. seedling and sapling density of Q. semecarpifolia except soil phosphorus which had significant relation with sapling density. Canopy cover and litter thickness had positive correlation to both seedling and sapling density while soil nitrogen, soil potassium and organic carbon had negative correlation. Soil phosphorus and herb cover had negative correlation to seedling but positive correlation to sapling while pH had positive correlation to seedling but negative correlation to sapling. There were no significant differences of microsite conditions among the four aspects of the forest and in between the uppermost site and the lowermost site except soil potassium and soil organic carbon. Key Words: Regeneration, Q. semecarpifolia, microsite conditions, canopy cover, Nepal