Phytosociological Method for the Evaluation of the Biodiversity and Medicinal Plants

Today sustainable management of natural resources and especially of the aromatic and medicinal plants is the key issue policy of the economic development particularly on the remote areas. It is a bridge concept connecting society, economics, ecology and ethics. The sustainable management of vegetational natural resources, calls for the expansion of land use planning, including specific functions of ecosystems as biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Among the research, works in the field of inventory and evaluation of biodiversity will be prevailing. Series of important factors are assigned to biodiversity as function of ecosystem and inventory of it leads to the determination of the degree in which the function is present and of the ecosystem’s ability to fulfill the given function. In this work, beside the inventory of medicinal plants, ɑ and ɤ diversity are estimated. For the space distribution of vegetation types and plant species, including medicinal plants, remote sensing techniques are used. Before the evaluation of the natural resources and biodiversity a phytosociological study is conducted on the territory of Skrapari’s Municipality (as case study) in order to identify the plant association and their species list (phytosociological table). Twentyone vegetation communities were defined by the application of TWINSPAN (Juice 7.0) and SYNTAX 2000, as classification and ordination techniques. For the space distribution of the plant associations and medicinal plants a coordinative grid (1 x 1 km) is implemented (in total 830 points), from which 157 releves are randomly selected for phytosociological analyses. As the result of the analyses different aspects of specific (α) and ecologic (γ) biodiversity are estimated and mapped.