The mixed forest of broad-leaved and Korean pine is the dominant type in the Xiaoxing’an and Changbai Mountains of China. However, few studies have been done on its canopy interception of rainfall. In this study, rainfall amount, rainfall intensity, and canopy interception were monitored during the growing seasons in 2010 and 2011. The results showed that cumulative canopy interception of rainfall was 22.0% and 21.9% in 2010 and 2011, respectively. However, the canopy interception of rainfall varied with rainfall events from 6.6% to 82.7% in 2010, and from 8.7% to 80.2% in 2011. The relationship between rainfall amount and the ratio of canopy interception to rainfall amount could be described by a power function (P < 0.01), i.e., the canopy interception decreased with the increasing rainfall amount and intensity. These results indicate that the rainfall amount and intensity were important factors for estimating the canopy interception of the studied forest type.

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Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica is one of the main species to be afforested in deserts of China. But little work has been carried out on the canopy interception loss of this plant species. For researching the canopy interception loss of a natural P. sylvestris forest, we observed the gross precipitation, gross snowfall, throughfall and stemflow in a sample plot at the Forest Ecosystem Research Station of Mohe in the Great Khingan Mountains of Northeast China from July 2012 to September 2013. Considering the spatial variability of the throughfall, we increased the area rather than the number of collector and randomly relocated them once a week. The results demonstrated that the throughfall, stemflow, and derived estimates of rainfall and snowfall interception loss during the main rainy and snowy seasons were 77.12%±5.70%, 0.80%, 22.08%±5.51% and 21.39%±1.21% of the incident rainfall or snowfall, respectively. The stemflow didn't occur unless the accumulated rainfall reached up to 4.8 mm. And when the gross precipitation became rich enough, the stemflow increased with increasing tree diameters. Our analysis revealed that throughfall was not observed when rainfall was no more than 0.99 mm, indicating that the canopy storage capacity at saturation was 0.99 mm for P. sylvestris forest.

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