Kraków is a city still rich in biodiversity, which needs to be explored, monitored and protected. There are already some protected areas, including five small nature reserves, two ecological areas and three fragments of big landscape parks. Most nature reserves are situated within landscape parks.

The main aim of our project is to identify places in Kraków that should be protected, with regard to their nature and landscape value and which are not under protection yet. We think that this creates an ideal opportunity for cooperation between researchers, students, volunteers, nongovernmental organizations and city authorities.

The most important issue is to recognize the biotic value of such places and surrounded areas. Such information can help in the creation of city development plans. If they are taken into consideration we will be able to save huge amount of wildlife in the city, and conserve or even improve current landscape quality.

We have already located over 30 such places (see here), however, they still need to be fully explored. In most cases we have only basic information about the wildlife and landscape value of these places and their localities. Only a few of them are well known in regard to their biodiversity. For example the meadows next to our Institute, which are within one of the landscape parks.

To collect more detailed data we divided the whole city into 342 quadrates, each of about 1 km² area, mapped their habitat types and now data about bird, amphibian, reptile, butterfly and snails are being collected.

Our project biodiverCity (a words combination: biodiversity and City) started in 2002 and currently we cooperate with ornithologists from a nongovernmental organization that is interested in bird diversity in the Małopolska region (Małopolska is the government region in which Kraków is situated) and also herpetologists, entomologists and scientists concerned with mollusc diversity.