Wall vegetation in urban and rural areas regarding landscape architecture and their ecological characteristics

Urbanization is often considered to be related with industrialization. Depending on how fast industrialization goes on, urbanization also irrepressibly grows all over the world. One of the most important results of this situation is the pressure on natural resources, which unconditionally gets worse and worse. Urban areas, in which horizontal surfaces are too expensive to be turned into green, seriously have lack of green infrastructure. Furthermore green infrastructure has important roles on ecology, sociology and economy. As a natural result of the fact that the demand in urban areas creates a serious pressure on green areas, alternative ways are needed to create more green patches. At this point, green walls and green roofs are the first things coming up. However, it is still difficult to say that there is sufficient knowledge on this kind of areas which are created by following the characteristics on natural habitats so that they could sustainably support green infrastructures. In fact these two major alternative green areas are often left to exotic species, which are known to be hardy. As a supposed result of this situation, these areas often have great difficulties in running ecological functions that those which have native species do. Main purpose of this study is to collect important basic information regarding green parts on vertical surfaces in urban areas by examining the spontaneous wall vegetation and their main ecological characteristics, which forms why those plants exist on the walls. By doing that, it would be possible to create more sustainable green walls using native – spontaneous vegetation on the walls in urban areas, which means higher positive ecological effects and lower economical cost. In this study, of which the main materials are 60 walls in urban and rural parts of city of Trabzon, wall vegetation were collected and identified. Afterwards, different statistic tests were run to explain the relationship between the ecological conditions and the plant compositions on the walls. After all, the study aims to be an innovative step to the creating of more suitable green walls using spontaneous wall vegetation in urban areas.