Founded in 1992 on the basis of the Kryvy Rih Department of Donetsk Botanical Garden, dating back to1974.
The founder and creator of the botanical garden in Kryvy Rih area was professor Yevhen M. Kondratiuk, who had dreamt for his whole life of creating botanical gardens in industrial regions. Given the menace of environmental disaster that had loomed over the region, he was one of the first to realize the need for developing a new trend in biology – that of industrial botany.
Today Botanical Garden’s activities focus on the environmental problems of this industrial region, so its main research areas are:
- preservation of plant biodiversity in nature and culture as a basis for sustainable development;
- studies of structural and functional changes in biogeocenotical cover on the territories transformed by anthropogenic impact.
Over those years, researchers of the Botanical Garden have developed scientific groundwork for reclamation of various types of soils degraded by mining. Under the supervision of A. Yu. Mazur, Garden’s director, they have studied environmental and ecological&edaphic conditions in disturbed areas; worker out the ecotopological differentiation of the region; studied the processes of soil formation and syngenesis of vegetable cover on various types of industrially disturbed soils; selected an assortment of arboreal and grassy plants suitable for producing a protective phytomeliorative cover on disturbed areas; developed the most efficient planting methods and a system of plant care; revealed structural&functional mechanisms of plant adaptation to hostile environment at anatomical, physiological and genetic levels; proposed measures towards improved mineral nutrition of plants, relying on research into complex microbiological and biochemical transformations of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon compounds in soils changed under anthropogenic impact. Those developments are protected by certificates of authorship and 3 patents of Ukraine. The resulting biotechnologies for recultivation of various types of industrially disturbed land have been used on the area of over 500 hectares.
The Botanical Garden is proud of its collection stock of more than 3 thousand plant species; collections of trees and shrubs have been registered as the National Asset of Ukraine.
Scientific principles and technologies of creating a botanical garden in an industrial region, alongside with methods for preserving biodiversity of steppe ecosystems on urbanized territories, developed and put to practice by the Garden, have formed a basis for practical recommendations on producing protective and decorative green plantations in industrial regions and preserving the diversity of biotas, both natural and cultivated.
