Column density (left) and temperature (right) distributions within the G323.18+0.15 complex. The black contours indicate the ¹³CO (J = 2−1) integrated intensity in areas where T_mb is higher than 3σ (3 K), The contour levels start from 2 Kkm s⁻¹ and increase in steps of 11 K km s⁻¹. The velocity interval of the integration is −69 to −61 kms⁻¹. The region surrounded by the dotted white line is used for the calculations in Sect. 4.1. The dot-dashed white line is the skeleton of filament G323.179+0.149 identified by Li et al. (2016). The black and red diamonds are prestellar and protostellar clumps from the Herschel HIGAL clump catalog, and the white crosses are ATLASGAL 870 µm clumps (see Table 1 for details). The white circle in the right panel is the H_II region G323.187+00.129 identified by Anderson et al. (2014).