Abstract:Based on a forest survey in Nanning city, this paper discusses the characteristics of the urban forest. Seventeen patches of the forest were selected for this survey, representing 4 functional areas of the city, i.e. education, living, transportation and commercial areas. There were 45 tree species and 24 shrub species as major components of the urban greening. Minority species were dominant in biomass. The pattern of the species distribution needs a rapid improvement. The average DBH of the community was significantly correlated with density, indicating the similarity between urban forest and natural forest. However, negative correlation between canopy coverage and density or modified importance value （mlV） suggested that the urban forest was special. Forest area had a significantly positive corelation with DBH, while importance index, indicating that spatial resources had negative with density, canopy coverage and synthetic same impact on community structure in urban forest as those in natural forest. The result of the classification of the urban forests by cluster and PCA analysis coincided with that based on the functional area, except a few patches of the forests. The patterns of the forest distribution in functional areas reflected that human cultural value had an impact on greening events. The vegetation community in the city still had large space to be improved and optimized.