Seasonal Change in C₃/C₄ Mixed Vegetation Populations over Paddy Levees in South Korea = 남한의 논둑에 발달한 C₃/C₄ 혼생식생의 계절변화

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Studies of seasonal changes in $C_3/C_4$ mixed communities are rare, particularly in Asian summer monsoon climate zones. In our present study, seasonal changes in the profile and coverage of $C_3$ and $C_4$ plants were investigated in 2009 in Haenam, Yeongdong and Cheorwon regions of South Korea (all at different latitudes). The aim was to estimate the impacts of temperature and sunshine duration on species composition and transition timing of the $C_3$ and $C_4$ plants. From our results, the number of $C_3$ plants was found to increase from early spring to mid-May, and then decrease again until September in the Haenam and Yeongdong regions, but continuously increase from early spring to September in the Cheorwon region under relatively low summer temperatures. On the other hand, the number of $C_4$ plants increased from June or July to September in all three regions. These seasonal changes in species number and ratio have a direct impact upon species diversity which is highest when there are no dominant species. The relative coverage and relative summed dominance ratio (SDR') of the $C_3$ plants decreased from spring to autumn, but increased for the $C_4$ plants during this time in an exponential fashion with increasing accumulated temperature and sunshine duration. The transition timing from $C_3$ to $C_4$ plants occurred when the sum of sunshine duration for the days with daily mean temperature above $5^{\circ}C$ was 1017 hrs for the SDR'.