The Department of Plant Ecology of Gdańsk University was spun off from the Department of Plant Ecology and Nature Protection in 1999. Two academic departments arose as a result: the Department of Plant Ecology and the Department of Plant Taxonomy and Nature Protection. This step was the University's response to a number of developments within the original Department, which was expanding its staff, keeping pace with rapid advances, facing the need for more classes and courses of study, and, to deal with all these things, handling a growing number of administrative task.
The Department of Plant Ecology applies the insights of plant ecology, palinology, palaeoecology and archaeobotany to the work of monitoring, modelling, diagnosing and reconstructing the natural environment. Research on the habitats and vegetation of present-day and past environments, including paleoenvironments, is done in the Department's
LABORATORY OF FRESHWATER ECOLOGY
and LABORATORY OF PALAEOECOLOGY AND ARCHAEOBOTANY.
These two laboratories focus the Department's intense interest in the ecological processes and the natural or human-caused transformations occuring in selected ecosystems on time scales ranging from weeks to epochs.
