Abstract:

Understanding of the category and distribution pattern of Plant Communities in the tourism development is a basis for ecological management of the scenic zone. This study employed Two-Way Indicator Species Analysis(TWINSPAN), Detrended Correspondence Analysis(DCA), Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) and DCCA to classify and sort plant communities in Putuo Mountains under tourism development and analysed the influence of tourism on plant communities. The result showed that: 1)TWINSPAN divided all the sample areas into seven sections which represented seven types of plant communities. There was an obvious gradient in the pattern of plant communities from complicated to simple with orientation from the left to the right. The gradient objectively reflected ecological relationships between tourism development and plant communities. 2)The first axis of DCA reflected the Integrated environmental gradient, that is, from the left to the right the altitude and the slope increased and the aspect turned from sunny to shaded. At the same time the distance to tour road go far and width of tour road broaden. In other words, the tourism influencing index decreased gradually from the left to the right. 3)There was a relatively strong correlation between the first axis of DCA and all of the geography factors. Specifically, there was a relatively strong negative correlation between the first axis of DCA and width of tour road, distance to tour road and slope shape. There was a relatively strong negative correlation between the second axis of DCA and width of tour road and slope. At the same time it has a positive correlation with altitude. All of these are in accordance with the distribution of their DCCA Ordination graph and turn out the accuracy of DCCA result. It is obvious that tourism development had influenced plant communities and the more tourists, the more influence. It is suggested that the scenic spot should be divided into core reserve, recreation buffer and dense recreation area through scientific partition. The result shows that the tour administrators should arrange scenic spot and tour facilities reasonably according to the relationship between plant communities and geography factors in order to reduce the impact of tourism on vegetation. The paper suggests that we should make scientific plan to protect vegetation resources and decide the quantity of tourists as well as make greater efforts to publicize them.

Key words: tourism development, plant community, geographical factors, tourism influencing index, Putuo Mountains