Abstract:

Autotoxicity is a chemical interaction among intra-specific plant individuals. It is a mechanism the plant to avoid competitions that acquired through a long time of adapting environment and evaluating selection. Coniferous forests are the most important timber species in China. At the long practice of forest management, it was found that natural forest of coniferous appeared the problems of reduction of growth, regeneration and productivity and the irrational distribution of size and age structure of the plants. In addition to the reasons of regulatory rotation and wrong exploitation, secondary metabolites released by litter and root secretion, which were excessively accumulation and formed autotoxicity, might be the main cause of these problems while expelling toxins mechanism of ecosystem such as fire procession were interfered by human control. The article reviews the categories, releasing approaches, characteristics and mechanism of action, bioassay methods, and effects on ecosystem of autotoxin and research status of coniferous forests autotoxicity. The authors think that the main purposes of research of autotoxicity are for providing us methods to solve various ecology problems, especially at the aspects of sustainability development of agriculture and forestry, nature resources and environment conservation.

Key words: autotoxicity, autotoxic substance, phytochemical ecology