Journal of Rangeland

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The changes in the richness and plan’s tdiversity are of the signs of ecosystems manipulation. The more diverse the ecosystem is, the greater its resistance to degradation. Regarding the importance of this issue, this research was conducted in Arangeh rangelands located at  the southern hills of Alborz. Investigate of the changes in species diversity and functional diversity of vegetation under different biological situation was the goal of the study. Data collected from five sites under different biological circumstances namely, seeding, pit seeding, exclosures, grazing management and natural rangeland. Indices of species diversity including: richness (S), Shannon (H), evenness (E) and Simpson (D) and the functional diversity index (convex hull hyper-volume (CHull), Functional Richness (FRic), Functional Evenness (FEve), Functional divergence (FDive) and index Rao (Rao) were calculated for all sites. FD package and generalized canonical discriminant analysis (gCCA) were used in R 3.1.1to calculate these indices and determine the effect of grazing intensity on diversity indices. In addition, Duncan's test was used to compare the means of grazing intensities. The results of the mean comparison indicated that the natural rangeland has the highest Shannon index and has a significant difference with the exclosure site. There was no significant difference in seeding sites and  natural rangeland in terms of  richness index. For other measures such as cluster analysis there was significant difference at (p< 0.05). The results of analysis of variance for different performance variables indicated that among functional diversity indices, except for the (CHull), functional richness indicators (FRic), functional divergence (FDiv) and evenness (FEve) showed a significant response to biological measures. The results of the mean comparison showed that Rao index had the highest value in the exclosure.