Вшивкова Т.С.
В журнале Лесоведение
Год: 2024 Номер: 4 Страницы: 421–446
Intact forest areas (IFA) are an important part of valuable natural areas. They represent large areas of wilderness within the forest zone and perform protective, climate-regulating functions, reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases, maintain biodiversity and play an important role in the carbon cycle. In the Russia’s Far East, the processes of carbon cycling have so far been insufficiently studied, especially within forest river ecosystems. One of the first stages of research to understand the patterns of transformation and transport of carbon in river ecosystems should be the study of the species and trophic structure of river communities, the identification of organisms – primary destructors of organic matter and algorithms for the sequential processing of autochthonous and allochthonous organic matter produced in river and adjacent terrestrial ecosystems. The paper presents the results of an analysis of the structure of benthic communities of 22 waterways (44 habitats) located in forested and deforested areas, and identifies 5 types of communities (with 10 subtypes), corresponding to the longitudinal zones of the river and the main parameters determining the architecture and “economy” of the river ecosystem in in accordance with the concept of river continuum. It has been established that the main primary destructor of leaf litter in the upper reaches of rivers in the south of the Russian Far East are gammarid crustaceans. It has been shown that forest cover disturbance leads to changes in the fundamental structure of river communities and leads to irreversible changes in the ecosystem.
