Eva Šmerdová

Masaryk University | MUNI · Department of Botany and Zoology

Urban areas exert a significant influence on plant species assemblages. The mosaic of different urban land uses is reflected in the distribution patterns of different plant groups. Here we present the results of the first systematic and detailed floristic survey of the city of Brno, Czech Republic. We studied the flora of Brno from 2011 to 2021, an...

The class Montio-Cardaminetea includes vegetation of springs with constant water flow. These habitats, which function as islands for highly specialized and sensitive biota, are endangered by ongoing landscape and climatic changes. Although a harmonized classification into vegetation units is necessary for effective habitat conservation, there is cu...

Aims The summit grasslands of many European mountain ranges were historically used for summer grazing, which ceased in the 20th century. These grasslands are changing, partly through succession after abandonment and partly owing to environmental changes. Subalpine vegetation is also affected by artificially reduced avalanche frequency. Recent conse...

An undesired succession of rich fens leads to the formation of dense Sphagnum carpets that outcompete brown mosses and some vascular plants, resulting in biodiversity loss in fen habitats of high conservation importance. Small‐scale Sphagnum removal is a rarely implemented conservational measure, whose success may depend on soil alkalinity and fert...

Halophytic habitats are distinctive components of the landscape in southern Moravia, Czech Republic, and the Pulkau valley in northern Lower Austria. We provide a historical overview of their flora and vegetation since the early 19th century and describe the current state assessed in the field at all remaining sites in 2020. We summarized the histo...

Aims Classification of European bog vegetation ( Oxycocco‐Sphagnetea class); identification of diagnostic species for the class and vegetation subgroups (orders and alliances); development of an expert system for automatic classification of vegetation plots; and production of distribution maps of the Oxycocco‐Sphagnetea class and its alliances. Lo...

Increasing evidence for the effects of Holocene history on modern biotic communities suggests that current explanations of community patterns and conservation strategies require revisiting. Here we focused on Central European rich fens that are at high risk among mire habitats because of their relatively low environmental stability, and hence sensi...

Aims Understanding fine-grain diversity patterns across large spatial extents is fundamental for macroecological research and biodiversity conservation. Using the GrassPlot database, we provide benchmarks of fine-grain richness values of Palaearctic open habitats for vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens and complete vegetation (i.e., the sum of the...

Questions: Species-area relationships (SARs) are fundamental for understanding biodiversity patterns and are generally well described by a power law with a constant exponent z. However, z-values sometimes vary across spatial scales. We asked whether there is a general scale dependence of z-values at fine spatial grains and which potential drivers i...

Water resources and associated ecosystems are becoming highly endangered due to ongoing global environmental changes. Spatial ecological modelling is a promising toolbox for understanding the past, present and future distribution and diversity patterns in groundwater-dependent ecosystems, such as fens, springs, streams, reed beds or wet grasslands....

The moss Drepanocladus lycopodioides, considered extinct in the Czech Republic, has been rediscovered. The population occurs in an abandoned sandstone quarry with a shallow water pool; the site known as Lom Rasová is located in the Bílé Karpaty Mts (the White Carpathians) in the south-eastern part of the Czech Republic. The species has not been rec...

Water resources and associated ecosystems are becoming highly endangered due to ongoing global environmental changes. Spatial ecological modelling is a widely used tool for understanding the past, present and future distribution and diversity patterns in groundwater-dependent ecosystems, such as fens, springs, streams, reed beds or wet grasslands....

Question Filtering of vegetation plot records according to sampling size is an essential methodological step in vegetation studies. In fens, the variation of traditionally used plot sizes seems to limit continental‐scale syntheses following the Braun‐Blanquet approach. Which plot sizes harbour the analogous number of habitat specialists (i.e. diagn...

Modern databases containing large amounts of botanical data are a promising source of new results based on large data analyses. We used a new database of plant macrofossils of the Czech and Slovak Republics to compare the recent distributions of putative relict species of fen bryophytes with their past distributions since the late glacial. All the...

GrassPlot is a collaborative vegetation-plot database organised by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG) and listed in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD ID EU-00-003). GrassPlot collects plot records (relevés) from grasslands and other open habitats of the Palaearctic biogeographic realm. It focuses on precisely delimited plots...

Increasing evidence suggests that past human activities have irreversibly changed soil properties and biodiversity patterns. In the White Carpathian Mts (Central-Eastern Europe), a mosaic of hyper-species-rich and species-rich patches have developed in a regularly mown dry grassland in the area of a glassworks abandoned in the eighteenth century. W...

Aims: Phytosociological classification of fen vegetation (Scheuchzerio palustris-Caricetea fuscae class) differs among European countries. Here we propose a unified vegetation classification of European fens at the alliance level, provide unequivocal assignment rules for individual vegetation plots, identify diagnostic species of fen alliances, and...

Aims Phytosociological classification of fen vegetation ( Scheuchzerio palustris‐Caricetea fuscae class) differs among European countries. Here we propose a unified vegetation classification of European fens at the alliance level, provide unequivocal assignment rules for individual vegetation plots, identify diagnostic species of fen alliances, and...

We studied changes of terrestrial snail assemblages over a gradient of soil moisture using 60 sampling plots in the White Carpathian Mountains of the south-eastern Czech Republic. We used within-site design to control for confounding effects of site characteristics other than humidity, and we directly measured soil moisture along nine transects at...

We focused on the gradient in moisture along transects of from 8 to 30min length from spring fen to semi-dry grassland vegetation. We selected an area in the calcium-rich part of the Western Carpathian flysch zone (Czech and Slovak Republics) where small spring-fed fens occur in close contact with semi-dry grasslands. Altogether 126 vegetation plot...

Biomass is an important ecological property, but its measurement is destructive and time-consuming and therefore generally missing for historical vegetation plots. Here we propose and test indirect estimation of herbaceous biomass using models based on easily obtainable variables, namely plant height and cover. We compare these models with Ellenber...

Ecological theory predicts that the species composition of island habitats is, among others, shaped by the mass effect of nearby ill-adapted populations, but this has rarely been tested. We investigated small calcareous spring fens scattered within species-rich grasslands in a region in which particular locations differ in climatic and edaphic cond...

Questions Does plant species richness and composition of eastern Mediterranean dwarf shrubland (phrygana) correlate with soil pH? How important is the effect of pH on species diversity in relation to other environmental factors in this ecosystem? What is the evolutionary background of the diversity-pH relationship? Location Western Crete, Greece. M...