Effect of Light Conditions on Chestnut (Castanea Sativa) Leaf Morphology

Increasing of degradation process in Chestnut (Castanea Sativa) pure stands as reserved forest in west of Hyrcanian forest led to genetic erosion of the stand. Understanding of ecological demands of plant species is necessary for their management and conservation. So we investigated on leaf morphologic characteristics of chestnut in response to different light regimes.
For this purpose 60 trees of natural stands around of Ebrahim Emamzade (in Shaft city located in Guilan province) were selected. Ten leaves (40 leaves from every tree) randomly were selected from four aspects of trees (north, south, east and west). These leaves were imposed by different light regimes. Some of the parameters such as lamina length, lamina width, distance from leaf base to the leaf maximum width, petiole length, nerves (counted variable), teeth (counted variable), leaf tooth width, leaf tooth length, tooth distance and tooth index were measured and analyzed after calculating the plasticity for each character in four aspects.
Findings: The plasticity values showed that there is no significant differences among four aspects of crown. The results indicated that plasticity of all studied characters is so low while the most value of C.V was belonged to leaf limb width (4.04%).
Discussion and The results of ANOVA showed that all studied parameters had no significant differences between surveyed aspects except distance from leaf corner to the most leaf limb width. Our finding confirmed that morphologic characters of Castanea sativa leaf has low flexibility in response to light conditions. We suggest that study of other ecological demands are necessary for presentation of accurate guidelines to forest managers.