Abstract: Combining the method of French-Swiss schools and that of British-American schools, species composition, diversity, frequency, regeneration patterns of different communities and structures, limitation factors of understory woody plants in the artificial plantation of Shanghai central city and the Green Belt were studied from 2007 to 2009 in 908 plots. The result showed that: ① The species richness in understory layer were much more abundant than in the upper layer, the species diversity of the needle broad-leaved mixed forest and the mixed evergreen and deciduous broad-leaved forest were much higher than the other community types, and so did the tree-shrub-herb structure and the tree-herb structure compared with the shrub-herb structure. ② 101 woody plant species were detected in the regeneration layer including 33 evergreen species and 68 deciduous species; only 36 species which mainly composed of deciduous broad-leaved trees and native species had the frequency of more than 1%; 〖WTBX〗Ligustrum lucidum〖WTBZ〗 and〖WTBX〗 Cinnamomum camphora〖WTBZ〗 appeared in more than half of the communities，the rates of frequency are 58.6% and 53.7%, respectively. ③ It was suggested that the seed sources and dispersal, light intensity, the soil moisture and the coverage of the regeneration layer were the key limitation of understory vegetation regeneration.

Key words: artificial forest, understory regeneration, limitation factors