Response of species diversity indices to topographic-climatic factors in Angemar Protected Area, Mazandaran Province

Biodiversity of rangeland ecosystems is directly affected by the biotic traits and environmental factors of the ecosystem. These ensures the sustainability of the ecosystem against environmental and biological changes. The aim of this study was to investigate the response of Performance diversity and species diversity indices to topographic-climatic factors in Angmar region, Mazandaran province. For the task plots were placed in the study area Plant feature including leaf area, dry matter percentage and plant height in each plot were measured and recorded. Environmental factors included topography (slope, aspect and altitude) and climatic factors included average annual temperature, humidity and rainfall were mostly the target features. Performance diversity indices including FAD1, FAD2 and MFAD, FDvar performance divergence indices and FRao performance uniformity indices as well as species diversity indices (Simpson, Shannon, richness and uniformity indices) were calculated in Fdiversity package and to evaluate the significance of the relationship between environmental factors and these indicators, the generalized linear regression (GLM) model was used in R software. The results showed that relationship between species richness and rainfall, altitude and Shannon index was significant only with slope. Simpson index was significantly associated with direction and altitude variables, but uniformity was not significantly associated with any of the environmental factors. The results of Spearman correlation between species diversity indices and performance characteristic diversity indices show that among the species diversity index, Shannon index has the highest correlation with FAD1 yield diversity index. In general, the results showed that topographic-climatic factors have an important relationship with yield. There is a positive relationship between species characteristics in the ecosystem and ecosystem processes.