From Concept to Reality: Three Urban Meadow Initiatives at the University of Latvia Botanical Garden

Botanical gardens, as publicly accessible institutions, serve both to demonstrate cultivated plants and to foster an understanding of wild flora and habitats. In the boreal region, recent years have seen active efforts to create urban meadows to enhance biodiversity in cities, parks, and urban outskirts. Gardens may not have the capacity for large-scale experiments, but they can provide controlled environments for various management regimes, regular monitoring, and visitor behavior studies.
The University of Latvia Botanical Garden has established three different urban meadows, each with its own origin, species composition, and purpose.
In the first meadow we aimed at enhancing biodiversity in an old lawn: around 70 vascular plant species collected from dry and mesic semi-natural meadows were systematically sown or planted in 2014. To maintain biodiversity, controlling expansive and invasive species by weeding and annual late mowing was carried out to encourage self-seeding.
The second meadow aimed at learning from controlled experiment by comparing six management techniques (five replicates) including mowing once or twice, the addition of semi-natural grassland soil, and the sowing of wild meadow seeds. The most effective treatment – turf removal, soil addition, and seeding – significantly increased plant diversity from 20 to 100 species in four years.
The third meadow was established in 2023 in an existing dry meadow as a part of urban meadow network of at least 45 meadows in the frame of UrbanLifeCircles Life project to promote biodiversity in Riga city. In the Botanical Garden, soil harrowing and removal of litter were carried out prior to sowing new plants. The
following year, successful establishment and flowering of new species were observed.
Each study and effort to maintain urban meadows is an attempt to restore understanding of the role of meadows in nature and society, demonstrate the great species diversity, and highlight the various ecosystem services they provide. The established urban meadows at the Botanical Garden provide an insight into grassland diversity, appropriate management, and restoration potential in private and public urban areas.
These initiatives not only enhance biodiversity, but also serve as educational resources for the public.