Marius Munschek (Universität Leipzig)
Marius Munschek's Master thesis was awarded with the Prize for the Best Plant Science Master Thesis, which was carried out at Leipzig University in the year 2023 with the title:
Putting Conservation Gardening into practice - An interactive database of endangered plant species in Germany
For the first time, Munschek examines the potential of conservation gardening as a participatory nature conservation measure for the preservation of endangered plant species in Germany and provides citizens with a list of endangered plant species suitable for gardening in the form of an interactive database.
In this study, Munschek presents a workflow using Germany as a case study to obtain information on endangered plant species regarding their amenability for conservation gardening, their ecological requirements for gardening, and commercial availability. Therefore, he synthesized the Red Lists of all 16 federal states in Germany, and text-mined a comprehensive platform for garden plants, as well as multiple German producers of native plants. To provide accessible information, Munschek developed a user-friendly app that offers region-specific lists of CG plants, along with practical guidance for planting and purchasing. The findings reveal that a median of 845 plant species are red-listed across federal states (ranging from 515 to 1123), with 41% of these species amenable to gardening (ranging from 29 to 53%), resulting in a total of 988 CG species. Notably, 66% of these species (650) are already available for purchase. Additionally, he observed that many CG plants exhibit drought tolerance and require less fertilizer on average. With a multitude of declining plants amenable to gardening and the vital role of gardens as refuges and green corridors, CG holds substantial potential to catalyze transformative change in bending the curve of biodiversity loss.
Link to the App: https://conservation-gardening.shinyapps.io/app-en/
Paper: Munschek, M., Witt, R., Kaltofen, K. et al. Putting conservation gardening into practice. Sci Rep 13, 12671 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-39432-8
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Marius Munschek conducted this work at the Institute of Special Botany and Functional Biodiversity in the working group of Prof Alexandra Weigelt and Prof Christian Wirth.
