2019 APPLIED ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH 2019 17(卷), 6(期), (15731-15743页)
The vegetation in fragile ecological areas easily degrades and the original ecosystem is hard to preserve. This paper attempts to disclose the effects of different plant communities on the physical properties of the soil in the Yimeng Mountains of eastern China For this purpose, the relative weight of soil particles in varied sizes was measured by the mechanical sieving method firstly. Next, the fractal dimensions of soil particles were computed based on their mass. After that, the uniformity and curvature were calculated for soil particles in varied sizes, under the cumulative percentage contents of 10%, 30%, and 60%. The results show that the local soil is predominately coarse sandy soil and the soil structure of forests is way better than that of slope wasteland; by fractal dimension, the coverage types were ranked in descending order as mixed forest > pure forest > economic forest > farmland > slope wasteland; the fractal dimension has a significant positive correlation with the particle size of fine sandy soil and coarse powder. The research findings shed new light on how to select tree species and design vegetation types to recover and reconstruct the vegetation in mountainous regions of eastern China