INTRODUCTION A National park is an area set aside by a national government for the preservation of the natural environment. The World Conservation Union defines a National park as a natural area designated to protect the ecological integrity of one or more ecosystems for present and future generations. In Pakistan, the earlier ecological studies were generally observational. The earlier studies, generally appeared in 1950’s, were confined to visual description of the vegetation, and no attempts were made to recognize community types and to correlate them with the relevant environmental factors. On the contrary, advanced multivariate techniques of ordination and cluster analysis had been routinely used in Europe and other parts of the world. There are numerous ordination methods accessible in plant bionetwork, some of which have been extensively used, e.g. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) (Hill & Gauch, 1980), whereas some others only sporadically used (Zhang, 2004). A series of studies using different ordination techniques were carried out in Pakistan by Ahmad et al., 2009; Ahmad, 2009; Jabeen & Ahmad, 2009; Pirzada et al., 2009; Ahmad et al., 2010a, b; Ahmad, 2011. In Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) the floristic statistics and the environmental variables can be assimilated within the ordination (Kashian et al., 2003). Within the Ayubia National Park, the study area was the moist temperate forest in Rawalpindi, NE-Pakistan (Fig. 1), showing a high diversity of susceptible plant and animal species. The geographical location of the park is 330° 52' N and 730° 90' E (Farooque, 2002). The aim of this research was to quantify the vegetation in Ayubia National Park using ordination techniques and to determine the soilvegetation relationship to provide basic awareness for preservation of nationally significant native flora. A list of plant species present in the study area is provided in Table 1. Apart from their importance from ecological point of view few species are used as medicinal herbs by local inhabitants. Observed biodiversity of occuring species indicate that this area can be used for conservation of native flora. Exploring the vegetation dynamics and community assemblage in Ayubia National Park, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, using CCA
by: Qurat Ul Ann, et al.
Published: (2011-09-01)
