Technical University of Munich

Geobotany covers a broad spectrum of scientific problems considering all aspects of vegetation. The co-existence and interaction of plants may be looked at from different aspects as floristic characteristics, chorology, coenology (including symmorphology and synsystematics) and ecology (autecology, demecology and synecology). Understanding these manifestations in vegetation, particularly in the dynamics of vegetation, requires to connect many of these aspects. Our research and teaching has a strong applied aspect, whether we are dealing with forestry and silviculture, nature conservation, or broader land use management issues. As a science, geobotany has two cognitive strategies:(1) Top down approach. (2) Bottom up approach. We apply a question- and object-related combination of both research approaches in order to develop the scientific bases of modern ecosystem management, especially focused on forest ecosystems. This will enable us to comment on a range of topical questions which forestry and forest management might ask in order to ecological improve their operations. Questions where geobotany may provide helpful support include natural vegetation and site conditions, dynamics of forest stands which are close to an undisturbed natural stand situation, stand stability under changing conditions, and assessments of ecological values and exhaustion of certain plant communities and vegetation complexes, their current and required protection status, and the development of nature conservation strategies. The scientific emphasis of TUM - Geobotany is on: - the description and ecological interpretation of vegetation units; - the analysis of interactions between environmental conditions and vegetation units; - the causal analysis of changes in vegetational composition and the development of vegetation units; - the investigation of ecological processes; - the transfer of knowledge to forest and landscapemanagement