Pleioblastus chino, one of the dwarf bamboos, is an important forage plant for the Sika deer on Kinkazan Island, northeastern Japan. Sika deer prefers this plant and the leaves mostly exhausted in winter. As the result of the long-term grazing, P. chino was reduced in its size and the total standing crop in the grazed plot was by far smaller the in the ungrazed plot. However, the following results showed that P. chino was considerably tolerant of grazing if the grazing was not excessively heavy : (1) the culm density was remarkably high in the grazed plot, (2) the proportion of leaf weight was greater in the grazed plot than in the ungrazed, (3) the P. chino community has been maintained as a bioclimax for these some decades. Under heavy grazing conditions, however, the P. chino community was retrogressively replaced by a Zoysia japonica community.
抄録全体を表示