On the Vegetation Zone of Mt. Paektu

백두산의 식생대에 관하여

Mt. Paektu(2,749.6m)m the biggest mountain in Northeast Asia, located on the border line of Korea and China is characterized as an aspite with broad gentle mountain area and rich biota. however, it seems that the study of forest vegetational feature or vegetation zones in the whole area of this mountain is not yet sufficient in spite of contribution by many investigators. in this paper thermal climatic approach was carried out for the determination of vegetation zones of the mountain with the meteorological data of four stations including Cheonjj and various vegetational data. the application of Warmth Index and/or coldness Index(Kira 1977) for the determination of forest vegetation boundary was useful also here, and their boundaries largely coincided with those of thermal indicies obtained in the Korean Peninsula(Yim and Kira, 1975), including the lapse rate of air temperature along increasing elevation. However, in the mountain the boundary of vegetation zones in not clear like those of mountains in Korea. It may be due so the topographic differences between this area and the Korean Peninsula. Besides, the broad ecotones between different vegetations in this area support the vegetation continum concept rather than the unit concept, and the limit of timber line or tree line reflects various hypothesis(Steven and fox 1991). Therefore, for the explantion of vegetation zone of this area should be considered topography or soil condition, for example, as known the hierachy of ecological units (zonobiomes, orobiomes and pedobiomes, Walter, 1973).