Abstract
This study was conducted for an understanding of a threatened plant species,“Penthorum chinense”, which is a vegetation structure and environmental characteristic in the southern part of Ibaraki, Japan. We selected distribution and contiguity area where P. chinense is not distributed and we set up 69 sites by the quardrat method. The surveyed general characters in each site include mean-height, mean-coverage, moisture condition water depth coverage and depth of litter layer. We calculated the degree of succession by the survey data and grasped the main distribution area, vegetation structure, growth environment of P. chinense by TWINSPAN classification and DCA ordination. The results of this study are as follows. First, P. chinense habitat was categorized into the riverside and abandoned paddy fields. The riverside was influenced by natural disturbance caused by flooding and drought. These conditions led to a poor P. chinense growth. The abandoned paddy fields as the artificial disturbance area have high potential value, because the area can preserve P. chinense growth space by succession control and water management. second, we executed TWINSPAN analysis based on vegetation coverage data of survey sites. The vegetation types were classified into the three categories: annual plant flora(P. chinense dominates in wet state), perennial plant flora(Solidago altissima dominates in dry state), and perennial plant flora(Phragmites communis dominates in wet state). Third, the data was ordinated by DCA. The sample sequences along the first and second DCA axes effectively reflected moisture condition, number of species, mean height, coverage of litter layer and degree of succession. Especially, P. chinense flora has the high correlation with moisture condition and number of species.
