Abstract

LEQUERICA, Manuel; BERNAL, Mauricio  and  STEVENSON, Pablo R.. Directionality evidence in high andean forest early successional process. Colomb. for. [online]. 2017, vol.20, n.1, pp.63-84. ISSN 0120-0739.  https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.colomb.for.2017.1.a06.

Secondary growth forests have increased their extension in the last decades, and have been suggested as potential conservation reservoirs. The objective of this study was to evaluate diversity and vegetation composition in abandoned pastures and grazing plots at Granada (Cundinamarca, Colombia) to assess if successional processes show evidence of directionality. We placed six 0.1-ha plots in the forest edges, one towards the forest and other to the abandoned paddocks in three locations. We determined average vegetation structure, diversity, and floristic composition for each plot. We found that diversity is significantly higher in forest plots than in paddock plots (at early succession stage) in high Andean cloud ecosystems. The successional stage of each one of the study sites was characterized using non-metric multidimensional scaling. This analysis shows that vegetation tends to group in function of age groups more that it does by geographic location of the plots, suggesting succession is a directional process. Seedling recruitment was not significantly different between forest edge and forest interior. An inverse relation was found between floristic and geographic distances, reflecting the fact that matrix discontinuity is a limiting factor for seed dispersal, thus it is a barrier for high Andean cloud forest succession.

Keywords : secondary growth forest; floristic distance; geographic distance; diversity abandoned paddocks.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )