Tree-circles spontaneous vegetation over a long climatic gradient
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Tree-circles spontaneous vegetation over a long climatic gradient U. Šilc 1
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F. Küzmič 1
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S. Aćić 2
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R. Ćušterevska 3 & N. Jasprica 4
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Đ. Milanović 5 & D. Stešević 6 & Ž. Škvorc 7
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Urban flora varies between urban habitats within a city and between cities. We used a particular urban habitat - tree-circles to compare floristic differences between urban agglomerations along a long climatic gradient on a continental scale. We recorded flora of this unique habitat in seven West Balkan cities and compared it to seven cities from Western and Central Europe. On average, 91 species were found on tree-circles in every city in the Balkans (compared to 81 in continental Europe). Climate was the most important factor influencing species composition. Western and Central European tree-circles floras are much more uniform and homogeneous than Balkan ones, which have richer species pools. Keywords Tree-circles . Baumscheiben . Urban habitat . Balkan . Vegetation . Homogenization
Introduction Urban areas are mosaics of habitats (Mazerolle and Villard 1999; Wittig 2008) and high urban species diversity is a product of fine-scale spaces or habitats, and the contrasts among them (Forman 2014). Urban flora has been an object of research since the early years of botanical science (Sukopp 2002) and flora of a whole city or comparisons between several urban agglomerations have been the focus of many studies (Pyšek 1993; Pyšek 1995). The problem was that such species lists and floristic maps also included historical data, long time spans, many ephemeral species, and particularly all urban zones within a city, so some ecological patterns and processes were not detectable. It became obvious that several different urban habitats appear within a city, with different disturbance regimes and environmental conditions and, consequently, different species
composition. Studies have therefore been conducted considering the flora or vegetation of particular urban habitats, such as forests, gardens, green roofs, wastelands and abandoned lots (see references in Lososová et al. (2011) and Muratet et al. (2008)) and recently the investigation of different habitats or land use in the city, as well as comparisons among cities (Celesti Grapow and Blasi 1998; Čeplova et al. 2017; Lososová et al. 2011; Stešević et al. 2014). There is also a need to study the diversity of small patches, not just large green spaces (e.g., parks, forest remnants), since they also play an important role in urban space (Shwartz et al. 2013). Spontaneous vegetation growing around tree bases in cities is a specific urban habitat, and the German term “Baumscheiben” (Wittig 1995), or English equivalents “treecircle” (Ise 2006) or “street tree pit” (Pellegrini and Baudry 2014) and “urban tree bases” (Omar et al. 2018) are usually used for descriptions of this urban habitat. Tree-circles are
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-020-
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