Year: 1958
Type: article
Abstract: Mt. Shimagare (2395 m. above the sea) is one of the hills in the northern part of Yatsugatake dead volcano group, of which the highest peak is Mt.Akadake (2899 m.), in Nagano Pref., at a distance of 130 km.NW W from Tokyo.In the dark green of the gentle southwest slope of Mt.Shimagare covered with subalpine coniferous forest, several whitish stripes horizontally running in parallel with each other can be seen in a distant view so distinctly that the mountain has been named "mountain with dead trees strips" according to its conspicuous physiognomy (Photo.1, 2 and Fig. 1).The vegetation consists of several forest units, each of which has a serial arrangement from very young tree offspring in higher part up to overmatured and dead trees of Abies Veitchii and A. Mariesii in lower part, just as the natural image of Wagner's border cuttings") (Fig. 2).The whitish stripes are the dense stands of dead tree trunks of these conifers (Photo 3), and they will shift upwards in decades.Okubol~>, Yoshida and Yamanouchi12> have already surveyed the forests from the view-point of forestry.They collected a lot of preliminary informations on the size, density and growth of trees, and tried to discuss the origin and shifting of the dead trees strips, though rather speculatively.Therefore, these problems might be well worthy of more precise ecological and physiological investigations into the origin and maintenance of such forest unit arrangement, especially on the basis of the dry matter production') of the trees, because these investigations will bring many new findings about natural features of intra-and interspecific competitions and of plant succession, of which fundamentals have been studied theoretically and experimentally by the authors and their co-workers4>, 5>, 6>, 7>, and about the climax vegetation in the subalpine of central Japan.
Source: Shokubutsugaku Zasshi
Institutions: Tokyo Metropolitan University, The University of Tokyo
Language: English
Subfield: Forestry
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2331200536