The vegetation adjacent to watercourses is an important component of the agricultural landscape due to its influence on water quality, biodiversity and landscape permeability. The structure of the vegetation and the influence of different kinds of usage of adjacent land and watercourse maintenance has been intensively studied in an attempt to establish the most effective management system to maintain biodiversity. In the eastern part of Central Europe however, studies considering those problems are rare. In this research, the vegetation on the banks of ditches in an agricultural landscape in the southwest of Poland was examined, on the floodplain of the Odra River. The land reclamation system consisted of ditches and channels has been neglected since the period of socio-economic transformation in 1990s. The watercourses were divided into homogeneous segments with respect to the adjacent vegetation, watercourse morphology and water depth. Vascular plants species with the cover higher than 5% were noted. A total of 134 km of watercourses were divided into 536 segments, the segments were mapped with GPS receiver. The quantitative participation (QP) of each species was calculated as the sum of percentage cover multiplied by the length of the segment, and was expressed as a percentage of the sum of the QP of all species. The typology of the vegetation was created on the basis of hierarchical clustering method, using TW INSPAN software, the species – environment relations were explored by multivariate statistics (DCA and DCCA). The results showed that a few species, such as Calamagrostis epigejos, Urtica dioica, Quercus robur, Phalaris arundinacea, Prunus spinosa, Phragmites australis, and Alnus glutinosa covered more than 60% of the investigated banks. These species were able to dominate the vegetation and create distinctive assemblages. 8 vegetation types were distinguished: four of them, dominated by grasses, could be connected with the management of ditches, whereas remaining types, consisted woody plants and common reed (Phragmites australis) were results of ditch management cessation. Such cessation leads to widespread of typical forest plants species along watercourses into the areas of open fields, whereas the species typical of open habitats avoid forest neighbourhood. The influence of differed kind of agricultural usage (arable land, grassland, fallow land) was less important than the general difference between watercourses place next to forests and those in the open surrounding. The ditches morphology as well as the presence of water influenced the species composition significantly, nevertheless they were not a crucial factor influencing the surveyed vegetation.
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