Effect of forest structure changes on permutation and diversity of corticolous lichens (case study: Kheiroud forest, Nowshahr)

Although quite a few studies have been done in respect to forest structure and development in Iran, there is no study dealing with the evolution of lichens at different stages of forest development. For this reason the research has been carried out to study lichens diversity and identify reference and indicator species for each forest development stage at Gorazbon series of Kheyroud forest at Caspian region of Iran. After separating the different forest development stages at the series, sampling was made from all trees with more than 40 cm dbh at each stage, using a 40 x 60 cm frames to record lichens type and frequency. Richness, evenness, diversity and dominance indices at different development stages were calculated and compared, applying Variance Analysis and Duncan test. Results showed that there are significant differences between the development stages in respect to lichens diversity indices and they were the highest at destruction stage, except for Berger-Parker dominance index. Furthermore, results of Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) showed that classification of the development stages in relation to the lichens cover data, leads to formation of specific groups with relatively high separation potential. Overall, 38 lichens species have been identified and according to Analysis of Indicator Species (IV) and Monte Carlo test, there were significant correlations between each of the optimal, ascension, and destruction stages of the forest developmental and 8, 17, and 13 numbers of lichen species, respectively, which are clearly found to be classified and differentiated with such significant differences.