Abstract: This paper studied the changes in biodiversity during community succession process using various diversity indexes combined with DCA ordination and monadic linear regression analysis, based on the investigation of plant communities on the rocky slopes of mine in Zhoushan Island. The results showed that the succession processes were divided into three stages, i.e., herbaceous stage, shrub stage, and shrubtree stage, respectively. With the development of succession, species richness increased significantly, and the diversity and dominance indices also went up. Meanwhile, the succession process of artificial communities was different from that of natural communities. On the recovered slopes, succession series included the growth stage of  natural immigrants, the competition stage with designed plants, and the stable state where the immigrants coexist with the designed plants. It was obvious that introducing adaptive woody species would shorten the period of succession in the mining area. Our study suggested that reasonable mixtures of species were able to enhance the positive succession during artificial vegetation restoration.

Key words: ana-lytic hierarchy process (AHP), entropy method (EM), object-based classification, land use/ land cover, habitat suitability index(HSI)