Abstract:

Climate matching is a useful method to predict the suitable areas for exotic tree species to be planted. In most cases such work is mostly dependent on compatible climate zones, otherwise the result may lead to mismatching. In order to examine mismatching caused by incompatible climatic classifications between Australia and China, the climate zones were developed for both countries according to unique classification of China. Visual check approved significant differences between new developed and currently used climate zones of Australia as a result of incompatible classifications, particularly in identifying most temperate climate into subtropical climate. A compatible classification model with 15 groups was derived from a joint climate dataset of two countries with nine climatic variables in grid format using numerical clustering analysis. The spatial similarity of groups were displayed by GIS using compound of three primary colors to represent three dimension configuration of group similarity transformed from intra_group climatic variable mean matrix. Among the 15 groups in respect of climatic types seven groups were located only in China, others were shared by Australia and China. Although resultant maps indicated the unbalanced relative areas of shared climatic types in Australia and China, the most similar types were promisingly complementary to each other country in richness of tree resources and potential planting areas. The difference of rainfall regimes within developed climatic types in Australia should be high lighted. The potential of climate matching was discussed not only for exotic tree species introduction but also for native tree species management and ecosystem security assessment.

Key words: exotic tree species, introduction, climate analysis, numerical classification