Poland’s Brambles Mapped: 113 Species and Seven Diversity Hotspots

Brambles are among the most deceptive plants in Europe. The genus Rubus, which counts more than 750 species on the continent, hides its diversity in a tangle of blackberry canes that look superficially alike yet differ in prickles, hairs, glandular armour and leaf shape. A new study published in PhytoKeys brings order to this chaos for Poland, presenting an updated national checklist of 113 taxa, proposing one new species name and mapping, with unprecedented resolution, where the country’s bramble diversity actually concentrates. The work draws on 88,934 verified records from the ATPOL distribution database, spread across 3,157 grid squares of 10 by 10 kilometres, and it identifies seven regional micro-hotspots in which the bulk of Polish bramble species is packed.

The taxonomic difficulty of Rubus is not an accident of human perception but a product of the plants’ own biology. Most brambles reproduce asexually through facultative apomixis, a process in which seeds form without sexual recombination, so a single plant can hand down its exact genetic makeup to offspring that then drift, accumulate small differences and stabilise into recognisable biotypes. Combined with polyploidy, the possession of multiple chromosome sets, and frequent hybridisation between species, this generates swarms of microspecies whose boundaries are drawn by morphology and geography rather than by interbreeding. European convention treats only biotypes with ranges of roughly 20 kilometres across or wider as species, which excludes a vast number of purely local biotypes while still leaving an enormous number of legitimate taxa in play.

The scale of the revision becomes clear when the new checklist is set against its predecessors. Twenty years ago, the standard monograph listed 88 bramble species for Poland; the most recent national vascular plant checklist accepted 109. The new tally of 113 taxa includes 106 native species and seven established aliens, among them the Himalayan blackberry Rubus armeniacus. Twelve species are known exclusively from Poland and are treated as regional endemics, a remarkably high number for a genus whose seeds are dispersed mainly by birds. Two species formerly considered Polish endemics, Rubus capitulatus and Rubus lucentifolius, were dropped from the endemic roster after their occurrence was recently confirmed in northern Czechia, a reminder that endemism claims in this genus are provisional until neighbouring countries are equally well surveyed.

The study also performs a piece of botanical housekeeping with nomenclatural consequences. In 2025, botanists described a new bramble from the Polish Carpathians and named it Rubus magurensis, after the Magura region. What the authors of that name overlooked was that the epithet magurensis had already been used in 1956 by the Romanian botanist Alexandru Nyárády for a local bramble biotype from Magura Ocnei Mountain in Romania. Under the rules of botanical nomenclature, the later use is an illegitimate homonym and cannot stand. The new paper therefore proposes Rubus subbeskidensis as the replacement name, derived from the northern Polish part of the Carpathians where the species grows. The two plants are not close relatives: the Romanian R. magurensis belongs to a different series within the genus and is distinguished by hairy primocanes lacking stalked glands, stronger and straighter prickles, longer petiolules and narrower petals.

With the taxonomy settled, the geographic analysis delivers the study’s most striking visual: a species-richness map that glows red and purple in the country’s south-west and fades to blue in the north-east. More than 70 percent of Poland’s bramble species occur in south-western Poland, and 75 grid squares hold more than 20 species each. Within this broad pattern the authors distinguish seven micro-hotspots: the Kotlina Kłodzka Basin with the adjacent Sudetes ranges, the Moravian Gate, the forelands of the northern Carpathians, the Wyżyna Małopolska Upland around the Holy Cross Mountains, the Wielkopolska Lowland, the north-eastern foreland of the Sudetes, and the Lower Oder River valley.

The Kotlina Kłodzka Basin emerges as the richest hotspot of all. Across just 28 grid squares, 37 species have been recorded, and a single square, BF17 between Bardo and Kamieniec Ząbkowicki, holds 37 species in ten by ten kilometres, the national maximum. Five squares in this small basin exceed 30 species each, and four endemic or regional species occur there. The Moravian Gate hotspot follows with 33 species across 58 squares, and the Carpathian forelands constitute the largest hotspot by area, spanning 230 squares, of which 146 hold more than ten species. The authors note that this Carpathian hotspot could even be split into a western and a much larger eastern sub-hotspot, reaching from the Beskid Śląski Mountains to the northern Bieszczady.

Why these particular landscapes? The answer lies in a mosaic of habitats that brambles favour: disturbed sites within mesophilous deciduous and mixed forests, on moist and fertile to moderately fertile soils. Species richness clearly drops in the lower montane zone and toward the north-eastern lowlands, where the sub-Atlantic climate loses its grip. The hotspots also function as crossroads. Their species arrived from the south, east, west and north, and the Moravian Gate, a natural corridor between the Carpathians and the Sudetes, appears to have been the decisive migration route for southern species entering Poland, especially before the gate was deforested.

To make sense of these patterns, the authors assigned the brambles to four geographical elements defined by where each species reaches its range limit in Poland. Twenty-one primarily mountain species, such as Rubus glandulosus and Rubus apricus, hit their northern limit in the country and concentrate in the Western Carpathians, the Sudetes and the Głubczycki Plateau, their distribution tracking warmer summers, precipitation above 600 millimetres per year and richer soils. Thirty-two species, including Rubus divaricatus and Rubus radula, are tied to the warmer sub-Atlantic climate and reach their north-eastern limit in south-western Poland, with the maximum concentration of up to 17 species per square again in the Kotlina Kłodzka Basin. Twenty-four more, among them Rubus hercynicus and Rubus marssonianus, stop at their eastern limit in western Poland. The fourth element contains a single species, the cloudberry Rubus chamaemorus, which reaches its southern limit in northern Poland, survives in postglacial relict sites in the Karkonosze Mountains, and is now classed as endangered as warming temperatures dry out its peatland habitats.

The checklist is framed as a snapshot rather than a final word. The authors expect the national list to grow, because a considerable number of brambles recorded in neighbouring Germany and Czechia, from Rubus adpressus to Rubus wessbergii, grow close to or directly on the Polish border and have not yet been found inside the country. Each micro-hotspot also harbours local biotypes, most of hybrid origin, which swell the true number of genetic entities beyond the 113 named taxa. The authors call for targeted fieldwork in southern and western Poland, both to capture these missing species and to track how the ranges of thermophilous brambles shift as the climate warms, a change that may already be easing the north-eastward expansion of sub-Atlantic species from the south-western strongholds.

For a genus often dismissed as an impenetrable thicket at the field margin, the study delivers an unusually clear message: Poland’s bramble diversity is real, quantifiable and sharply localised. Nearly all of it sits in a handful of south-western landscapes where climate, soils and migration history converge, and a twelfth of the national flora of Rubus exists nowhere else. Protecting the Kotlina Kłodzka Basin, the Moravian Gate and the Carpathian forelands, the paper implies, protects not just individual blackberry bushes but an entire evolutionary laboratory in which apomixis, hybridisation and polyploidy continue to generate new species faster than botanists can name them.

Subject of Research: Updated checklist of the genus Rubus in Poland with a new species name and spatial analysis of bramble diversity micro-hotspots

Article Title: An updated checklist of the genus Rubus ( Rosaceae ), a proposal of a new name, Rubus subbeskidensis , and an analysis of micro-hotspots of bramble diversity in Poland

Article References: Nobis, M., Wolanin, M., Zając, A., & Trávníček, B. (2026). An updated checklist of the genus Rubus (Rosaceae), a proposal of a new name, Rubus subbeskidensis, and an analysis of micro-hotspots of bramble diversity in Poland. PhytoKeys, 277, 161-180. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.277.196859

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/phytokeys.277.196859

Keywords: Rubus, Rosaceae, brambles, checklist, apomixis, endemic species, phytogeography, biodiversity hotspots, Poland, ATPOL database, nomenclature, species richness