Do Diversity and Bio-morphological Spectrum of Psammophytes Matter in Restoring Vegetation of Sand Pits?

Open mining of sand is executed in the sand pits. After completion of the work sand pits are usually recultivated: firstly they are graded and then planted with trees and shrubs, but very often sand pits are abandoned to regenerate themselves. The sand pit becomes a source of dust and a hardly healed wound on the earth's body. In order to provide an adequate revegetation on such substrates, it is necessary to study biomorphological peculiarities of growing plants in a very specific environment characterized by high stiffness of slopes and high mobility of the substrate. The material for our study collected from Moscow Region sand pits in the Russian federation. Plants were collected from both northern and southern exposure slopes. Our work is based on the geobotanical descriptions made according to standard method on experimental sites of 5x5 m2. The results of the undertaken shows that Compositae, Gramineae, Fabaceae are the most representative of the surveyed one hundred twenty seven species of higher vascular plants from 29 families. Diversity on the southern slopes was more than on the northern ones. Species diversity is determined by the successions occurring spontaneously after a rough anthropogenic intervention, under the influence of such environmental factors as lighting, moisture, texture and richness of soil. The spectrum of life forms showed that the overwhelming majority according to K. Raunkiru are hemicryptophytes. Perennial herbaceous polycarpics are dominant in the spectrum of life forms, according to I.G. Serebryakov. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020.