Spontaneous succession and its role in vegetation recovery of post mining sites and other disturbed areas

Ecosystem restoration is vitally important, to return ecosystem in acceptable stage after anthropogenic disturbance. Spontaneous succession when disturbed area spontaneously recovers over time can be also considered as restoration method. This will restore vegetation cover, the interactions between biotic and abiotic components of the ecosystem, energy transfer, nutrient cycling and other important functions. In this thesis, I examined the influence of environmental variables on the cover of vegetation during succession. It was a mean annual temperature, mean annual precipitation, pH and soil types. The optimal course of succession appears to be a large increase of coverage at an early stage and its basically unchanged trend in other stages of succession. This was achived with an average annula temperature of 7řC, with an annual rainfall of 900 mm at pH 5 and the light and heavy soils. Key words: spontaneous succession, vegetation recovery, vegetation cover, disturbed area