Harvesting, drying and herbarium techniques in Rize urban green areas

Abstract

Parks and gardens, which are valuable parts of the urban habitat, have a dynamic structure and change over time. As a result of the intensive use of these areas, the existing plant taxa are sometimes well and sometimes badly affected. In this respect, knowing the natural floristic diversity in urban habitats, recording their inventories, detecting plant biodiversity is an important study in terms of presenting it to users. Herbariums created to classify and record plant biodiversity according to plant taxa can be used in various fields, scientific studies and course contexts to introduce students to plant taxa. The fact that the students who take the “Plant Recognition” course only learn plants from the pictures reduces the plant recognition ability of the students and even causes them to be unable to recognize the plant in reality. In field trips, which are another way of learning by seeing, it is not always possible to find the necessary plant taxa with leaves, flowers and fruits in all 4 seasons of the year due to different destruction effects or seasonal changes. In this respect, showing the herbarium samples to the students and making them accessible will improve the plant knowledge of the students. Within the scope of this study, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture Department of Landscape Architecture Herbarium was established with natural and exotic plant samples taken from 9 different areas containing plant biodiversity samples in Rize province, and the herbarium construction stages are given in detail. Within the scope of the study, an herbarium was prepared by taking samples from 160 plant taxa, 114 of which are exotic (71 %) and 46 of which are natural (29 %) in Rize parks and gardens. Supported by Recep Tayyip Erdogan University, this study is a Scientific Research Project named Inventory of Plant Species in Rize Province Parks and Gardens; (Project code: FBA- 2017– 824, Project Type: Normal Research Project).