Dynamics of the forest vegetation of the Umtiza Nature Reserve, East London

Abstract

The forest community at the Umtiza Nature Reserve near East London was surveyed using 24 plots (0.04 ha) in which all woody stems >0.5 m tall were enumerated. Based on a classification using numbers of stems of canopy species, it was assumed that basically only one forest community was sampled. Further multivariate analyses suggest that this forest is fine-grained. Sample plots were similarly placed in ordination space irrespective of whether woody species occurrence was used as importance value or if species occurrence per size class was used separately [seedlings (0.5-1.0 m), saplings (1-5 m) or canopy individuals (> 5 m)). An analysis of size-class distributions of the most common canopy species indicated that the majority of species exhibited inverse J-shaped size-class distributions. This is the expected pattern for a fine-grained forest. In these measures of dynamics, this forest is not fundamentally different to the more temperate Afromontane forests.