Floristic composition and vegetation community analysis of Gesha and Sayilem Forest in Kaffa Zone south western Ethiopia

Abstract

Abstract. Addi A, Soromessa T, Bareke T. 2020. Plant diversity and community analysis of Gesha and Sayilem Forest in Kaffa Zone, southwestern Ethiopia. Biodiversitas 21: 2878-2888. The study was conducted at Gesha and Sayilem districts of the Kaffa Zone with the objective of identifying the floristic compositions, plant community types, and associated environmental factors of the forest. Stratified random sampling technique was used. A total of 90 plots were used to collect vegetation data. The plant community classification was performed using agglomerative Hierarchical cluster analysis Ward’s linkage method was applied in R-software. Species diversity and evenness were evaluated using the Shannon diversity and evenness indices respectively. The study revealed that the study area composed of 300 species that belong to 239 genera in 96 families. Asteraceae was the most abundant family followed by Fabaceae, Acanthaceae, Poaceae, Rubiaceae, and Euphorbiaceae accounting 37%, 15%, 14%, 13%, 12%, and 9% respectively. Five plant community types were identified and these were Ilex mitis-Syzygium guineense, Pouteria adolfi-friedericii-Schefflera abyssinica, Millettia ferruginea-Sapium ellipticum, Arundinaria alpina and Schefflera volkensii-Masea-lanceolata community types. Among the community types, Pouteria adolfi-friedericii-Syzygium guineense community was the most diverse whereas Arundinaria alpina community was the least diverse community. Canonical Correspondence of vegetation data analysis indicated that altitude, disturbance, slope, phosphorus, and the electrical conductivity were the environmental factors that significantly influence the plant communities. The high dependency of local communities on the forest resources is affecting the plant biodiversity. Thus, conservation of the forest through the introduction of sustainable forest management interventions including participatory forest management seems an appropriate action.

Plant diversity of Petungkriyono Forest of Dieng Plateau, Central Java, Indonesia

“…The next step was to identify and compare to the identification book of species in the natural forest. The various publications were used as references to identify the observed and collected plants (Odum 1998;Giriraj et al 2008;Abedi and Pourbabaei 2010;Naidu and Kumar 2016;Kusumo 2016;MoEF 2017;Suryana 2018;Lillo et al 2019;Amiri 2019;Addi et al 2020;Lillo et al 2020).…”

“…High plant diversity was significantly influenced by an effective environmental condition, such as altitude, slope, aspect, and especially edaphic, climate, and anthropogenic. Conservation strategies are important factors that should be considered (Addi et al 2020).…”

“…There are three levels of biodiversity, which are genes, species, and ecosystems. Measurement of genetic diversity was referring to the variation of genes within a species (Sutrisno 2009;Naidu and Kumar 2016;Addi et al 2020).…”

“…Homalanthus populneus, and Macarangan tanarius have a similar trend with those that are found in Gesha-Sayilem forest. It is where the Euphorbiaceae represented the highest number of species that is contributed over 31.21% of the total species (Addi et al 2020).…”

Allometric Equation for Aboveground Biomass Estimation for Selected Trees Shrubs in Gesha - Sayilem Moist Afromontane Forest.

“…The topography of the landscape is undulating, with valleys and rolling plateaus and some area with flat in the plateaus. The altitude ranges from 1,600m to 3000m (Addi et al 2020). The monthly mean maximum and minimum temperature for Gesha is 29.5 0 C and 9.5 0 C, respectively.…”