🌱 Growing in waste areas 🌱 A tough plant

ruderal

1 9.9

Found in places where the ground is disturbed, like roadsides

adjective
/ˈruːdərəl/

Specialized

: ruderal

After the forest fire, a variety of ruderal species quickly emerged in the burned-out areas.

Examples

Many ruderal plants thrive in urban areas where construction has disturbed the soil.
Another group of declining species appears to be ruderal species that, by immigration, were sustained as sink populations in the old-growth forest.

Academic text (1992)
For instance, ruderal species are particularly responsive to CO2 enrichment (Hunt et al. 1993).

Academic text (2000)
In abandoned lots, you can often find ruderal species filling the gaps where cultivated plants once stood.

Antonyms

tended

4 2.7

Someone looks after it

Surface Forms

ruderal positive

Morphology

ruderal = rud + al

Although formed with the productive adjectival suffix '-al', the root 'rud-' is a Latin combining form meaning 'rubble' and is not a recognizable modern English base, so the meaning is not derivable by an average learner.

Etymology

Ruderal comes from the Latin root rudus, which means 'rubble' or 'broken ground'. So, ruderal describes plants that grow in rubble or other disturbed, waste places.