ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the plant communities of the Afroalpine and ericaceous zones, presents the distribution patterns of treeline species and the changes in the structure of ericaceous vegetation with altitude, and assesses the incidence and influence of fire on the diversity and composition of vegetation in the ericaceous belt. It considers vegetation in the ericaceous belt of the Bale Mountains along an altitudinal gradient ranging from 3000 to 4200 m. The Bale Mountains lie in the southeastern part of the Ethiopian highlands, about 850 km north of the equator. The highest peak in Bale, Tulu Dimtu, is the second highest peak in Ethiopia and the seventh in Africa. The presences of each of these indicators were summed for each relevés, yielding a combined index of fire incidence. Both the vegetation data and the environmental variables were analyzed with canonical correspondence analysis using CANOCO to explore the correlation between vegetation and environmental variables.
