Method on Determining Minimum Survey Area of Forest Communities

The size of survey area is very important to proper express the characteristics of the forest communities.This paper studied on the research plot dataset which composed by tree spatial positions data and tree species composition from China,Mongolia,Myanmar,South Africa and Germany,a new approach on determining the forest communities' minimum survey area presented by model and mathematics method.By setting quadrate sample in the center of plot and then enlarging its edge length interval 10 m to get the data of species-area curve and establish the species-area model,the minimum survey area can be determined by making the value of second derivative model is zero or approximate zero(1×10-6).The study also found that the relationship of minimum area with maximum species can be well described by semi-logarithm and the model can be directly estimated the survey minimum area by using potential tree species quantity in practice.