《A floristic survey of the Hyrcanian forests in Northern Iran using two lowlandmountain transects》.pdfVIP

J. For. Res. (2015) 26(1):187–199 DOI 10.1007/s11676-015-0019-y ORIGINAL PAPER A floristic survey of the Hyrcanian forests in Northern Iran, using two lowland-mountain transects Alireza Naqinezhad • Hassan Zare-Maivan • Hamid Gholizadeh Received: 13 September 2013 / Accepted: 9 February 2014 / Published online: 27 January 2015 © Northeast Forestry University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Abstract We investigated the floristic composition of the form, and chorotypes in the current study were compared Hyrcanian forests and the related forest-steppe ecotone in with similar transect studies in other areas of the Hyrcanian Northern Iran by using two long ecological transects, from forests and in different altitudinal belts, using Sørenson lowland to upper mountain areas. The study was conducted similarity indices. Floristic composition of the surveyed during 2008 and 2009 and yielded the identification of 395 transects demonstrated almost 50 % similarity between plant taxa belonging to 233 genera and 78 families. Dicots them. with 300 taxa were the richest groups of the flora, followed by monocots with 75 taxa, pteridophytes with 18 species, Keywords Hyrcanian forest • Ecological transects • and gymnosperms with two species. The largest families Sørenson similarity index • IUCN Red List • Endemism were Asteraceae (33 taxa); Rosaceae (32 taxa); and Poa- ceae (30 taxa), and the most diverse genera included Carex (15 taxa); Alchemilla (7 taxa); and Poa, Geranium and Introduction Acer (6 taxa each). Hemicryptophytes were the most dominant life forms in the area (40 %); followed by geo- Studies on ecology and the distribution of organisms within phytes (31.4 %); phanerophytes (15.4 %); therophytes