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Project Thracian mounds

Fri, 2019-03-01 23:41 — Gergana Vasileva

Project Thracian mounds – biodiversity hotspots and refugee islands for preservation natural flora and vegetation


This project was awarded in the competition session for fundamental scientific research in 2018 and funded by the National Science Fund (contract КП-06-Н21/2 / 18.12.2018)

Scientific significance of the study
 
Land use changes and agricultural intensification during the past decades have resulted in a considerable change in the environment. The burial mounds that have been preserved as landscape features for millennia also because they could hardly be ploughed. Therefore the burial mounds represent fragments of natural environment and biodiversity which have not explored in Bulgaria so far. They could be treated as ‘natural islands’ within the ‘agricultural sea’. So far, more than 150 years the burial mounds have been studied by historians who have published a lot of articles. Unlike other European countries, Thracian mounds in Bulgaria have never been explored in terms of their flora and vegetation. Distributed in different regions in the country, they host diaspores of broad variety of plants and could serve for biodiversity hotspots and provide ecosystem services such as pollination potential, habitats for the fauna and carbon sequestration.
 
The general objective of the project is exploring flora and vegetation developed on the burial mounds in Bulgaria and providing analysis on the significance of historical monuments for biodiversity conservation.

The expected project results will contribute to the knowledge about the significance of Thracian mounds not only as historical heritage but also as natural heritage in Bulgaria.

We suggest the following scientific hypotheses for testing:
  • Thracian mounds act as refuges for natural vegetation and considerably increase landscape scale biodiversity of human transformed landscapes;
  • The biodiversity of the mounds depends on their area;
  • The floristic composition of mounds highly depends on their biogeographical distribution;
  • The biodiversity of habitat islands highly depends on specific traits of species. Dispersal and persistent traits of plant species can highly influence their long term existence in habitat islands.
The Thracian mounds have been preserved as national cultural treasure, but we expect that the project results will offer arguments for their conservation as a natural heritage as well.

Project duration: 2018-2021
Project leader: Рrof. Iva Apostolova
 
 


by Dr. Radut.