Recovery Deficiency Following Tree Mortality in Mangroves of Two Caribbean Islands: Field Survey and Statistical Classification |
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Authors: | Jean-Marie Flower Daniel Imbert |
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Institution: | (1) Laboratoire de Biologie et Physiologie Végétales, Faculté des Sciences Exactes et Naturelles, Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, 97159 Pointe-à-Pitre Cedex, Guadeloupe, F.W.I., France |
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Abstract: | Mangrove species are well adapted to the harsh ecological conditions of their environment throughout the tropics. However,
in the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique (Lesser Antilles), deficient forest recovery was evidenced in 43 mangrove sites
(>1000 m2) affected by apparently natural tree mortality. Such sites were recorded from four chronological sets of aerial photographs
between 1950 and 1995, and field-investigated in terms of environment and vegetation characteristics. Given the speculative
relationship between the slow-regenerating vegetation and its present environment within non-steady state, disturbed sites,
statistical analyses arbitrarily matching physicochemical and biological data were primarily avoided. On one hand, principal
component analysis (PCA), combined with an agglomerative hierarchical classification, was performed on environmental, rank-ordered
data; on the other hand, multidimensional scaling (MDS) was implemented on vegetation data. Discriminant analyses (DA) further
characterized the environment/vegetation interrelationships for each site type. Ultimately, three main types of mortality
sites have been distinguished among the study areas. One type clustered the sites showing the lowest salinity values and the
highest surge vulnerability whose dominant mangrove species is Rhizophora. Another type presented highly saline sites having clayey soils with pure, stunted, Avicennia stands. The last type consisted of peculiar forest gaps on deep, compact, peat soils. During the rainy season, these sites
turned into shallow ponds scattered with living, young Rhizophora and large, standing, dead Avicennia. The authors suggest that this classification may serve as a comprehensive framework to test subsequent hypotheses (hurricanes,
droughts…) on the origins of natural massive tree mortality and the causes of recovery deficiency in mangroves of the Caribbean. |
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Keywords: | Avicennia Drought Forest recovery Hurricanes Lesser Antilles Mangrove Multivariate analyses Rhizophora Tree mortality |
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