Status of Community Structure and Regeneration of Quercus semecarpifolia S.M. in Forest of Chandragiri Hills, Central Nepal
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Boatany
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