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Disjunct Occurrences of Plant Species in the Refugial Mires of Bulgaria

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Abstract

Many mire vascular plant and bryophyte species have disjunct occurrences in Bulgaria despite that most of south-eastern Europe is not suitable for the occurrence of permanently waterlogged and nutrient-limited wetlands due to the current and glacial dry climate conditions as well as prevailing limestone bedrock. Unfortunately, such important distributional data are scattered throughout numerous papers and reports, and are not adequately provided even by national checklists and floras. No attempt to summarize them has been done yet. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to review and enlarge such data, and to use the resulting data set to address the question whether the disjunctly occurring rare species are concentrated in certain mire complexes or even in particular vegetation plots and if they do characterize such localities. Our current research shows that the phenomenon of isolated occurrences of mire plants in Bulgaria is even more widespread than previously thought. Seventeen species were found as new for Bulgaria with their distribution range limits there, and distributional data of many other species, including some previously considered extinct, were enlarged. Fifty-four mire species were found at only three or fewer sites. Our analyses showed a conspicuous concentration of rare, disjunctly occurring species at a few sites, which are, however, largely unexplored in terms of palaeoecology or ecology, not legally protected and currently threatened by human activities. The distributions of target rare species within Bulgarian mires were significantly nested, which means that more species-poor assemblages were subsets of richer ones. Nestedness was significantly related to the estimated area of mire complex, but not all high-diversity mires were large. Disjunctly occurring rare species were more concentrated in particular vegetation plots at lower altitudes and in mineral-rich fens. Fragmentary data about the ecology and history of Bulgarian refugial mires suggest that these mires harbour specific ecotypes and genotypes, contain specifically distributed biogeographic groups of species, provide an opportunity to test biogeographical hypotheses and shelter crucial information about the history of European mires. Thus, these sites have a potential to become a source of very important information for biogeographical, palaeoecological, and phylogeographical analyses.

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Acknowledgements

The authors express their thanks to the Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences supporting the research on Bulgarian wetlands in the periods 2003–2005 (project GAAV Nr. B6163302). The research and manuscript preparation were also supported by the long-term research plans of Masaryk University (Czech Ministry of Education, MSM 0021622416) and the Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences (AVZ0Z60050516) and the joint project between Bulgarian and Czech Academies of Sciences (2005-1010). We thank Jon Shaw for constructive comments on the manuscript and language correction of the text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Botany and Zoology, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Kotlářská 2, CZ 611 37, Brno, Czech Republic

    Michal Hájek, Petra Hájková & Michal Horsák

  2. Department of Vegetation Ecology, Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Brno, Czech Republic

    Michal Hájek & Petra Hájková

  3. Department of Phytocoenology and Ecology, Institute of Botany, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Iva Apostolova & Maria Lazarova

  4. Department of Biology and Ecology, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic

    Vítězslav Plášek

  5. Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Blanka Shaw

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  1. Michal Hájek
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Correspondence to Michal Hájek.

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Appendix 1 The list of disjunctly occurring rare species
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Hájek, M., Hájková, P., Apostolova, I. et al. Disjunct Occurrences of Plant Species in the Refugial Mires of Bulgaria. Folia Geobot 44, 365–386 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12224-009-9050-0

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