Many human-influenced habitats remain overlooked athough they have a great potential for nature conservation. We recognized this again during yesterday’s field trip to the Czechoslovak Army (ČSA) quarry, specifically to the area designated as a National Natural Monument. These habitats do not fit into the traditional categories we use to assess biotopes in the landscape; they do not form classic, relatively well-defined vegetation units, but rather often consist of various combinations of species, geomorphological features, site moisture conditions, successional stages, and different types of disturbance that determine the development of these areas.
Thanks to a meeting of experts who study anthropogenic habitats, as well as those involved in biotope mapping, we were able to identify a direction to take in classifying these underappreciated habitats. We then tested together, right in the field, what such a classification of anthropogenic biotopes might look like. We are now facing our first season of creating and testing this pilot classification system directly at the ČSA quarry, and there’s no doubt there will be plenty of surprises.
