Assessing succession stages and community distribution characteristics on mountainous ecosystem hosting coming winter Olympics games

Alpine mountain ecosystem shows strong interactions between abiotic and biotic parameters. They also received high attention from human activities. Considering coming international events such as the Winter Olympic Games (WOG) and its human impacts, foreseeing uncontrolled ecosystem changes is key. In this research, the vegetation communities distribution under different conditions were modeled in the Yin Mountains in Chongli Country (China), the core area of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Firstly, we surveyed the key factors limiting the vegetation communities development to guide the vegetation restoration after major events in this region. After that, the vegetation succession stage was assessed using the Two-way indicator species analysis (TWINSPAN) and market basket analysis (MBA) to classify the vegetation communities. Plant community and relationships among environmental variables were investigated through the trend correspondence (DCA) and canonical correspondence analyses (CCA). The results show that soil moisture and organic matter could be considered the main factors limiting the development of shrub and herb communities. The distribution of different forest communities was mainly affected by geomorphological factors such as slope positions, aspect and inclination. In middle and high altitude areas, apart of arbor and shrub communities generally showed the process of transformation from the pioneer community to transitional community in the competition. We conclude that providing the basis to understand the environmental factors that restrict the development of vegetation communities in the northern Yin Mountains was helpful to foresee uncontrolled and coming impacts after the WOG.