Fitocenološka istraživanja šumskih ekosustava na početku 21. stoljeća

Zagreb

2009

S. 53-62

56 Lit. Ang.

Artikel aus einer ZeitschriftUnselbständiges Werk

200162323

Phytocoenology (phytosociology) studies interactions bet©ween plant communities. It researches the dependence of plants on the living and non-living environment (climate, parent material, mineral soil composition). It provides explanation for the selective manner in which nature operates, which enables plant communities adapted to specific sites to form from the surviving tree, scrub and other plant species; it gives an overview of these communities and their changes over time. The article gives an account of a comprehensive historical development of phytocoenology in Central Europe and a description of certain issues in the contemporary phytocoenological study of forest ecosystems with special regard to Slovenia and Croatia.
Phytocoenology developed in the 19th century when botanists did not only study individual plants, but also how entire vegetation changes within a landscape. The focus of their attention became plant formations or plant communities in relation to their environment. In the southeastern European region, phytogeographical (geobotanical) or vegetation studies in the second part of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century were published by F. Krašan, G. Beck and L. Adamović, for example. An important milestone was the Botanical Congress in Brussels (1910), where the concept of association was defined. This resulted in a fast development of the discipline, but different methods were developed in different parts of the world, and attention was paid to different issues. The most widespread, also in Slovenia and Croatia, was the Central-European (Braun-Blanquet, Zürich-Montpellier) method. Among other things, the pioneers of phytocoenological research in Slovenia (G. Tomažič, M. Wraber, and V. Tregubov) and Croatia (I. Horvat, S. Horvatić) conducted also thorough research of forest communities. In this respect, HorvatÖs Biljnosociološka iztraživanja šuma u Hrvatskoj (Horvat 1938) is a pioneer work. In Slovenia and Croatia, phytocoenology established itself in forestry practice only after the Second World War. Soon after the end of the war two HorvatÖs books, Nauka o biljnim zajednicama (1949) and Šumske zajednice Jugoslavije (1950), were published. Professors Dušan Mlinšek and Milan Anić deserve a lot of credit for the promotion of phytocoenology in the forestry of Slovenia and Croatia because they emphasised the significance of the knowledge and consideration of sites in contemporary silviculture. The result of a very fruitful cooperation of phytocoenologists in the then Yugoslavia and more widely, within the Eastern Alpine and Dinaric Society for Vegetation Ecology in the 1970s and 1980s, was also a map of natural potential vegetation of Yugoslavia in the scale of 1:1.000.000 (B. Jovanović et al. 1986) and Prodromus phytocoenosum Jugoslaviae (Zupančič et al. 1986). The work of the time was incorporated also into the Map of Natural Vegetation of Europe in the scale of 1:2500000 (Bohn et al. 2000).