COMPREHENSIVE WAY OF CALCULATING ECOLOGICAL (ENVIRONMENTAL SPACE) FACTORS OF PLANT COMMUNITIES ENVIRONMENT FOR AMPLITUDE ECOLOGICAL SCALES

Abstract

Despite intensive development of instrumental methods of environmental factors analysis for plant communities their assessment with ecological scales still remains important. The main advantage of ecological scales is their ability to reflect generalized and average characteristics of ecological regimes due to significant inertia in response of plant communities composition to the change of certain characteristics of the environment. The main ways of calculation while using ecological scales are the medium-sized method and the ideal indicator method (of linear regression) including modified algorithm of calculating the level of edaphic and climatic factors of the environment with amplitude ecological scales. The aim of this work was to improve further the method for assessing the level of ecological factors (ecological space) in plant communities. For calculations and visualization of the results obtained we used Excel and our own programs written in the Matlab media. The basis of the method is finding the factor averagely weighed for the level calculated by the traditional way and by the method of the ideal indicator. It is proposed to set the weight of factors in both methods of calculation both explicitly and depending on the ecological index reflecting correspondence (adequacy) of the plant community composition to the level of ecological factors prevailing in the habitat. They can also be calculated by linear or non-linear dependencies relative to the middle of amplitude ecological scale. The conclusion is that it is possible to predict the content of secondary metabolites in plants based on assessing the level of ecological factors for plant communities.