PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Muha Abdullah Al Pavel AU - Sharif A. Mukul AU - Mohammad Belal Uddin AU - Kazuhiro Harada AU - Mohammed A. S. Arfin Khan TI - Effects of stand characteristics on tree species richness in and around a conservation area of northeast Bangladesh AID - 10.1101/044008 DP - 2016 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 044008 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/16/044008.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/16/044008.full AB - We investigated the effect of tree cover, forest patch and disturbances on tree species richness in a highly diverse conservation area of northeast Bangladesh. A systematic sampling protocol was adopted and 80 sub-plots from twenty five 1 ha plots were used for the vegetation survey. Linear regression analysis was performed to understand the effect of patch area, disturbances and tree cover on tree species richness. Ordination using Redundancy analysis (RDA) and Non-metric Multi Dimensional Scaling (NMDS) were also performed to explore the tree species compositional similarities along the stand characteristics gradient and locations of the sample plots. Our study revealed that, forest patch size has greater influence on species richness. Areas with medium level of disturbances have shown greater species richness. In constrained ordination the selected explanatory variables regulated the richness of common species. Our findings can be useful for better forest management and restoration of landscapes of conservation needs using ecologically important species.