{"id":29711,"date":"2022-11-22T12:54:57","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T11:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/broz.sk\/we-have-taken-a-small-step-for-humanity-in-the-white-carpathians-but-a-big-step-for-nature\/"},"modified":"2023-09-05T12:56:04","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T10:56:04","slug":"we-have-taken-a-small-step-for-humanity-in-the-white-carpathians-but-a-big-step-for-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/broz.sk\/en\/we-have-taken-a-small-step-for-humanity-in-the-white-carpathians-but-a-big-step-for-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"We have taken a small step for humanity in the White Carpathians, but a big step for nature"},"content":{"rendered":"
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]During the second weekend of November 2022, together with the association Pre Pr\u00edrodu, the JARO Group and the Administration of the PLA Biele Karpaty, we organized a volunteer event called Mission Apollo 11. It is probably unprecedented in Slovakia at the moment, as more than 70 people from Slovakia, the Czech Republic and France took part in the active management of the Babin\u00e1 natural reservation on Saturday. The main purpose of the conservation weekend was to restore rare dry grassland habitats and thus prepare the ground for the return of the king of butterflies, the mountain Apollo (Parnassius apollo<\/em>), after which the event was named.\r\n\r\nWe repeated the Mission Apollo 11 exactly five years later, as we met on November 11 in 2017 at the nearby Vr\u0161atsk\u00e9 Bradl\u00e1. Thanks to that, probably the largest Slovak population of mountain Apollo lives there today. A little over 50 volunteers took part in the event at the time, and the increase in the number of volunteers positively surprised us. “In recent years, we have seen a rather decreasing interest of the public in similar activities connected with the management of protected areas. The only exceptions are events focused on garbage collection or tree planting. However, these alone will not reverse the ongoing loss of biodiversity, and the second of them may even be counterproductive in this regard<\/em>,” said our colleague Jakub C\u00edbik about the event.\r\n\r\nOne of Saturday’s activities was correcting “planting” mistakes from the past. In the middle of the last century, the rock cliffs on Babin\u00e1 were reforested with Forest pine in an attempt to \u201erevive\u201c the barren rocks. Today, however, we paradoxically point to the fact that non-forest heat and drought-tolerant plant communities on cliffs belong to the most species-rich habitats in our country. At the same time, a large number of invertebrates, including rare butterflies are also tied to xerotherms, as these habitats are professionally called. In addition, the volunteers cleared the plat\u00f3 above the former quarry of overgrown trees, where a lot of White stonecrops, food plants of mountain Apollo caterpillars, grow. During the event, we managed to restore about a hectare of rare habitat, which wa destroyed not only because of afforestation, but also for spontaneous overgrowth due to the disappearance of grazing on the cliffs. It was a common and important part of the livelihood of local residents until the 1950s.[\/vc_column_text]