Diversity of woody plants in urban parks of Skopje, North Macedonia

Abstract

Urban parks are crucial components of a city’s green infrastructure, offering significant benefits from both social and environmental perspectives. They provide many ecosystem services and play a key role in maintaining, preserving, and enhancing urban biodiversity. This paper analyses the woody plant diversity in three urban parks in Skopje, North Macedonia. The research identified 90 different woody plant taxa in the analyzed parks, belonging to 42 genera and 23 families. The parks have a significantly higher number of non-native taxa compared to the native ones, as well as a significantly higher number of deciduous taxa compared to evergreen taxa. Although non-native species dominate to a great extent over the native ones, there is no threat from invasive plant species in the researched parks. Furthermore, the analyses included the calculation of biodiversity indices (alpha indices: Shannon, Simpson, and Berger-Parker, and also Sørensen beta index). The results showed that none of the parks are highly significant from a biodiversity perspective. The alpha indices indicate a low to moderate biodiversity in the studied North Macedonian urban parks. On the other hand, the Sørensen beta index indicated a more positive view, emphasizing the lack of significant similarity among the studied urban parks. Nevertheless, there is a clear need to enhance the biodiversity of woody plants in urban parks in Skopje. Integrating biodiversity considerations into the process of planning, landscape design of urban parks, and their maintenance is crucial. Establishing biodiversity monitoring as a standard practice will be essential for understanding the real situation in urban parks and enabling timely interventions.