When we say “endemic plant,” most people think of species like Daphne arbuscula, Onosma tornensis, or the Slovak pasqueflower (Pulsatilla slavica). Only few, however, know the Moravian ragwort (Tephroseris longifolia subsp. moravica). Yet this is an extremely rare member of the aster family that blooms only at the turn of May and June, on just a few small meadows in the White Carpathians, the Strážov Mountains, Vtáčnik, and Tribeč. Moreover, in all known localities, it survives in only dozens or, at best, hundreds of individuals. Precisely because of its uniqueness and vulnerability, we chose the ragwort as one of the target species of the LIFE Endemic PANALP project.
The greatest threat to this species today is land abandonment. Without management, meadows become overgrown with invasive shrubs and trees, and important transitional habitats between meadows and forests—such as forest steppes or pasture woods—are disappearing from our landscapes. These are key habitats for many rare species. In addition to the ragwort, the decline of such habitats also affects the Clouded Apollo butterfly (Parnassius mnemosyne), another target species of our project. Both of these species can be found together in the SCI Vršatské bradlá, at the Lysá locality, where we have devoted the most effort to saving the endemic ragwort to date.
In recent years, we have cleared the overgrowing edges of this meadow, all the way to the border of the adjacent forest plot. Without this intervention, the steep meadow would have gradually disappeared into the shadow of the forest, despite occasional mowing and grazing. Thanks to targeted restoration, we have doubled the area suitable for the ragwort’s life. However, the local population is also long-term threatened by browsing by game. Therefore, state conservationists from the Biele Karpaty Protected Landscape Area administration have begun to protect flowering individuals with individual enclosures, which allow them to flower and seed safely. Additionally, as part of our project activities from 2021 to 2023, we manually sowed hundreds of seeds collected in previous seasons.
We will still have to wait a few more years to see the full impact of all these activities, but early successes are already visible. In the cleared areas, sterile (non-flowering) plants have begun to appear, and after decades of decline, the number of flowering individuals has started to rise again. For illustration, while botanists counted 700 individuals here in 2006, by the start of the project their numbers had dropped to just dozens. But in 2022, we recorded 148 ragworts during monitoring, and in 2023 nearly 170! It thus appears that, thanks in part to our project’s efforts, the most difficult period for this endemic plant in the Vršatec area may already be over.
