Correlation Between Riparian Plant Communities and Plantpropagule Banks in Dicun Stream

In order to understand the species composition, quantity and spatial distribution of both typical shrub communities and their plant propagule bank and their relationship with aboveground plant communities along mountain river, Dicun stream, which was the source of the Jiulong River in the west of Fujian Province, was chosen to study. The seed germination method was used to identify the species of the propagules and the Jaccard similarity index to analyze the similarity between the aboveground plant community and its plant propagules. The results showed that: (1) The number of species in the aboveground communities of the Dicun stream was larger than that of the propagules. (2) The shrub community contained 76 plants belonging to 25 families and 64 genera, and 33 plants belonging to 14 families and 32 genera were found in the propagules. (3) The density of the propagule bank decreased with increasing soil depth, the seeds in the propagule bank were mainly distributed in the shallow soil 0.5 cm, and the number of seeds in the upper layer were 57.8% of the total number of seeds. The Jaccard similarity index of the shrub community in the Dicun Stream Basin was between 0.167 and 0.467, and the similarity between adjacent plots was relatively high, but the similarity between interval plots was relatively low. (4) The number of species shared by the propagules and the aboveground communities in the survey plot was low, the similarity was low, and there was no significant correlation between the density of the propagule bank and the density of aboveground communities. In summary, there were various reasons for the differences between the density and composition of propagules. The difference between the seed bank and the existing community could have been because the seeds in the propagule bank were not all from the existing community, but were from the long-term accumulation of different succession stages.