Today we celebrate World Wetlands Day.

Wet areas, such as swamps, riverside forests as well as lakes, rivers and streams, are an extremely important environmental factor providing a wealth of biodiversity. It is particularly visible in the part of the Pszczyna Historical Park called the Wild Promenade. Between the Cyranka pond and the main park avenue, there is an ecosystem shaped by periodic flooding (or a raised groundwater level), mainly from the Ulga canal. It is a whole complex of willow thickets, rushes and firehouses creating convenient microhabitats, which in their entirety create a very rich environment of biological life. This natural diversity results from the historical aspects of managing this area, which in the times of the Pszczyna princes was part of a larger landscape complex reaching as far as the Hunting Lodge in Promnice.

Thanks to the mosaic of habitats, you can meet here species such as kingfishers, night herons, cranes, red shrikes, wrens, swans, black terns, geese, otters, beavers and many others such as insects, arachnids, molluscs ... A natural feature, irreplaceable in such places there are willows, alders, ashes and herbaceous plants growing on the coastal escarpments ~ mow, fields of reeds. Such shading of watercourses means that the nutrients contained in the water are not immediately used by aquatic plants for their lush development. The deep-reaching roots of coastal plants capture harmful substances that may enter the water cycle. Similarly, the soil, thanks to the riparian vegetation, is not washed into ditches and canals, but retained on land. Wetlands are a huge reservoir of water, which is extremely important nowadays in the fight against climate change, especially with droughts and sudden floods of water during torrential rains.

How important this topic is is evidenced by the fact that 53 years ago the "Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as a habitat for waterfowl", was signed in Ramsar. The main purpose of the convention is to protect and maintain unaltered areas defined as "water~mud".

 

Text/Photo: Michał Makowski