Community structure of beach forest species in Mag-aba, Pandan, Antique

Abstract

The Philippine beach forest is one of the understudied and less-popular important ecosystem that provides great number of food and economic products in the country. In fact, we lost them much earlier than the mangrove community that there is miniscule information is existing about them. There is a need for understanding the forest status and community structure due to the rising threats of natural and anthropogenic factors. The unexplored forest patch in Barangay Mag-aba, Pandan, Antique can provide additional information on beach forest diversity and abundance in the country, thus the need for this study. This study aimed to record the different species and to provide description of the community of beach forest in Mag-aba, Pandan. Specifically, the objectives of this study are (1) identify, describe and classify the beach forest species present in the area, and (2) describe the community structure in terms of species composition, diameter at breast height and stand height, stand basal area, importance value, evenness and Shannon- Weiner Index of Diversity. The transect plot method adopted from English et al (1994) was used to obtained quantitative data. A total of 80 beach forest species representing 41 families were recorded. The family Fabaceae and the species Cocos nucifera dominated the forest community. The stand basal area of 83.24 m2 ha-1 reflects a mature beach forest community, however the community is made up of mostly low DBH classes (saplings and seedling) also indicating a regenerating forest. Mag-aba is characterized to have a low species diversity (H'=1.17), however the individual species are fairly distributed (J'- 0.83). These results are addition to the existing knowledge of beach forest community that would serve as information for conservation measures.