Jakub Málek

• Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

In recent decades, extreme droughts have affected Central Europe, altering forest structure and function with significant socioeconomic consequences. Most Central European forests are used for timber production and provide various ecosystem services and habitats for forest-dwelling species. The extent to which recent weather extremes have impacted...

Understanding temporal and spatial variations in historical disturbance regimes across intact, continuous, and altitudinally diverse primary forest landscapes is imperative to help forecast forest development and adapt forest management in an era of rapid environmental change. Because few complex primary forest landscapes remain in Europe, previous...

Natural disturbances strongly influence forest structural dynamics, and subsequently stand structural heterogeneity, biomass, and forest functioning. The impact of disturbance legacies on current forest structure can greatly influence how we interpret drivers of forest dynamics. However, without clear insight into forest history, many studies defau...

Understanding the processes shaping the composition of assemblages in response to disturbance events is crucial for preventing ongoing biodiversity loss in forest ecosystems. However, studies of forest biodiversity responses to disturbance typically analyze immediate or short-term impacts only, while studies relating long-term disturbance history t...

Estimates of historical disturbance patterns are essential to guide forest management aimed at ensuring the sustainability of ecosystem functions and biodiversity. However, quantitative estimates of various disturbance characteristics required in management applications are rare in longer‐term historical studies. Thus, our objectives were to (1) qu...

Mortality, driven by both climate and disturbance legacies, is a key process shaping forest dynamics. Understanding the mortality patterns in primary forests in the absence of severe disturbances provides information on background natural dynamics of a given forest type under ongoing climate change. This can then be compared to mortality rates in s...

Disentangling the importance of developmental vs. environmental drivers of variation in forest biomass is key to predicting the future of forest carbon sequestration. At coarse scales, forest biomass is likely to vary along major climatic and physiographic gradients. Natural disturbance occurs along these broad biophysical gradients, and depending...

Tree-related microhabitats (TreMs) are important features for the conservation of biodiversity in forest ecosystems. Although other structural indicators of forest biodiversity have been extensively studied in recent decades, TreMs have often been overlooked, either due to the absence of a consensual definition or a lack of knowledge. Despite the i...