Study On The Diversity Of Herbaceous Plant Communities In Reclaimed Land Of Antaibao Opencast Mine

The predatory exploitation of our country’s coal resources has caused large areasof land damaged, surface vegetation exposed, ecological environment polluted,ecosystems severely destructed in mining area as well as the loss of biodiversity.Therefore, it’s urgent to carry out land reclamation and ecological reconstruction onmining wasteland. Vegetation restoration is the basis to ecological rehabilitation ofmining areas, so it can effectively evaluate the effect of land reclamation andecological reconstruction through the study on plant community diversity.By the means of field investigation, this paper takes the dump reclamation land ofAntaibao opencast mine in Shanxi province as its research object and explores thediversity of herbaceous plant communities under different reclamation modes in2010and2011, based on several diversity indices, including species important value,Margalef index, Simpson index, Shannon-Weiner index and Pielou index. Studyingherb communities’ diversity in reclaimed land of mining area, as a useful method toassess vegetation and ecosystem’s restoration effect under different reclamationpatterns, is able to provide scientific basis and practical guidance for land reclamationand ecological reconstruction of mining area. The research results as follows:(1) From species composition analysis, there existed111species herbs inreclaimed land of Antaibao opencast mine, belonging to28families and80genera in2010, and130species32families79genera in2011. Among these plants, Compositae,Gramineae and Leguminosae were the largest three families; in the aspect of plant floradistribution, the top three types which contained largest genera in2010and2011wereboth North Temperate Zone and variants, World distribution and Old World Temperatedistribution types and subtypes. Moreover, North Temperate Zone took up thepredominant genera, while Tropical distribution with few ones; in the life formstructure, perennial herbaceous plants distinctly dominated in number, and theecological environment of reclamation land tended to more suitable and stable.(2) In the two years, WⅠplot contained the most herb species and highest species richness index, while SⅣ plot had the fewest herb plants and lowest richness index,which showed that there was a positive correlation between speices richness andspeices number; in terms of important value, the plot in which dominant speciesaccounted for a larger proportion of important value was distributed more unevenly.Besides, some plants cultivated at the early reclamation stage presented low importantvalue and appeared a serious recession; with respect to diversity index, WⅠplotpossessed the highest one and displayed the most uniform distribution.(3) Under different vegetation configuration modes, herbaceous communities’diversity was related with the coverage of tree layer. The diversity of herbagecommunities with different reclamation modes arranged in the following order: treeand shrub mixed forest> pure tree forest> tree mixed forest.