Abstract: Sexual reproduction is a crucial process of clonal plant life history, and to evaluate the plant sexual reproduction effort is of significance in judging the fate of species. This paper studied the sexual reproduction dynamics of Linnaea borealis and related affecting factors from the aspects of clonal architecture, ramets, and population. L. borealis had a clonal architecture of “guerilla”, with a quite fast clonal expansion and an obvious patchy distribution. At ramet level, small ramets had a higher reproductive effort than larger ramets. There were significant differences in the number ratio of assimilation shoots to flowering shoots and the mean fruitsetting rate between smaller ramets (L<50 cm, 1.57±0.49, and 57.77%±8.73%) and larger ramets (L >80 cm, 7.51±1.3, and 27.3%±6.52%, respectively) (P< 0.01). At population level, the number of flowering shoots per unit area in the clonal patches with relatively high density was significantly higher than that in the clonal patches with medium density and low density, being 44.2±4.65, 29.8±1.98, and 13.75±2.84, respectively (P<0.05). In the L. borealis patches with the same densities, the patches with more companion species had fewer sexual branch number than the patches with lesser companion species (P<0.01). The interferences coming from visitors activities decreased the flowering shoots number per unit area significantly. Some factors such as population density, interferences from visitors, and companion species affected the sexual reproduction of L. borealis mainly through affecting the number of flowering shoots per unit area.

Key words: interflow, soil architecture, runoff gene-ration mechanism., hydrogen and oxygen isotope, overland flow