Abstract: Through the investigation of species composition and ecological type, this paper studied the community structure characteristics of endangered plant Prunus mongolica. The results showed that P. mongolicahad a unitary community structure. A total of 42 species belonging to 23 families were collected, and most of them belonged to Gramineae, Compositae, Rosaceae, and Leguminosae. With the increase of altitude, the plant height and crown width of P. mongolica tended to be increased first and decreased then. There was a negative correlation between the community species richness and altitude. The comparison of β-diversity index showed that with increasing altitude, the similarity among the communities decreased and the species replacement rate increased, while the difference in the biodiversity between adjacent communities was not obvious and the species replacement rate became slow. Correlation analysis showed that the species richness of the community and the plant height of P. mongolica had close correlations with altitude, suggesting that altitude was the important factor leading to the changes of P. mongolica community.

Key words: Land use and management, Soil quality properties, Heerqin sandy land