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'Common and rare but in Katowice forever' AGNIESZKA BŁOŃSKA
University of Silesia, Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, |
Description popularizing the research project
In the vision of landscape architects city greens and flowers should be planted, mown, weeded and shaped. Rose and tulip beds, lawns surrounded with hedges and colorful compositions of shrubs should decorate squares and promenades. But outside the representative places nature arranges everything on its own. We know its work well. In spring and summer playgrounds are covered with daisies and dandelions to be followed then by dandelion clocks. The lawns are rimmed with bushes of snowberry spreading wide. The common plants which we observe every day on the way to work are bound with us much stronger than we think. They follow us everywhere as we brought and planted them and they ran wild. Along pavements and fences they approach houses, rubbish tips, and yards. Some of them grow shyly in the shade of walls, some burst into new environments. Usually we do not pay any attention to them as they are covered with dust. They are just like people as they come and go unnoticed like for example violets hidden in the shade of hedges. There are places where the fleeting plant community settles down to colonize areas which meet their basic requirements. It is worthwhile to observe such communities to discover striking similarities of post-industrial flora to the one of a glade remembered during some holidays. Like in Polish forests a careful observer will find rare treasures there.
And who guards the settlements? It is reed mace.
Just a moment! How so? A reed mace in the city?
Abstract
The environment of Upper Silesia Industry District has been for long time changed by man activity. It causes on one hand destruction and synanthropisation of already existing vegetation and on other hand it provides new specific circumstances for development of new vegetation. Nowadays in cities the cultivated vegetation such as parks, lawns, small gardens and spontaneous ruderal vegetation of native synanthropic species as well as anthrophytes play the most important role. The spontaneous ruderal vegetation has been the object of phytosociological research carried out using the classic Braun-Blanquet method. The aim of this study was to characterized the vegetation which develops on anthropogenic habitats in Katowice city; to find the regularity in its ecologic-spacial distribution on the city area and present the most frequent and the most expansive and dynamic phytocoenoses of ruderal vegetation on the investigated area. The studies vegetation is a dynamic mosaic of ruderal communities, the most trampled patches as well phytocoenoses dominated by arable lands weeds. In the plant cover of Katowice city is played by alien plant species. The alien species invade the native vegetation causing its transformation and with time the alien plants create agglomerations leading to vegetation unification.