Jan Brus

Palacký University Olomouc · Department of Geoinformatics

The coexistence of humans and nature has been a recurring theme throughout history, gaining particular importance in the context of climate change and the sustainability of our planet for future generations. However, the delicate balance between humans and nature is often disrupted, as exemplified by the Litovelské Pomoraví Protected Landscape Area...

Euanoma Reitter, 1889 is the most speciose genus of the click-beetle subfamily Omalisinae. Representatives of Euanoma are known from the Mediterranean, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. In this study, we describe E. rodosensis Packova & Kundrata, sp. nov. from the island of Rhodes, Greece, and E. alanyensis Packova, Kazantsev & Kundrata, sp. nov. from th...

The Asian or yellow-legged hornet Vespa velutina nigrithorax has been accidentally introduced into several European countries. This invasive species has an impact on entomofauna, mainly apiculture, and plant biodiversity through reduction of pollinators. We present the first record of the species in the Czech Republic, notes associated with this re...

Crops arose from wild ancestors and to understand their domestication it is essential to compare the cultivated species with their crop wild relatives. These represent an important source of further crop improvement, in particular in relation to climate change. Although there are about 58,000 Lens accessions held in genebanks, only 1% are wild. We...

In March 2021, an eruption began in the Fagradalsfjall volcanic system in Iceland after a quiescence of 6,000 years, which also marked the end of more than 800 years of dormancy in the Reykjanes Peninsula. In areas of volcanic activity, lava flow mapping and analysis play a significant role in monitoring and disaster risk management, because lava f...

Landslides are among the most serious geological hazards in mountainous and hilly areas of New Zealand, where they frequently cause significant damage and landscape changes. Monitoring the evolution of landslides and their consequences can help to mitigate hazards that could arise in later reactivation phases or in similar cases. The abundance of t...

Vicia villosa Roth, commonly named hairy vetch (HV), is one of the most promising cover crop (CC) legumes, commonly included in strategies aimed at increasing agriculture sustainability. Due to the generally low yield, the availability of commercial seed is often limited. The objective of this study was to identify management and key weather factor...

Wild emmer wheat is an excellent reservoir of genetic variability that can be utilized to improve cultivated wheat to address the challenges of the expanding world population and climate change. Bearing this in mind, we have collected a panel of 263 wild emmer wheat (WEW) genotypes across the Fertile Crescent. The genotypes were grown in different...

Bumblebees are significant pollinators for both wild plants and economically important crops. Due to the worldwide decrease in pollinators, it is crucial to monitor the prevalence and distribution of bumblebee pathogens. Field-caught bumblebee workers and males were examined for the presence of three pathogens during the summer months of the years...

[This corrects the article .].

Interactivity in today’s society finds its way into many facets of life and can be used in various ways, including 3D printing. For example, various 3D models can be incorporated into museum exhibitions and serve as interactive media for visitors, deepening their experience. One of the advantages of haptic 3D models is the immediate haptic feedback...

ICAO's latest analysis of the economic impact of COVID-19 on civil aviation shows that global passenger traffic declined sharply by 60% in the combination second, third and fourth quarters of 2020, equivalent to a reduction of around 2.7 billion passengers compared to 2019 [1,2]. The European system of air traffic flows, which formed over decades,...

Beekeepers have various options to control the parasitic mite Varroa destructor in honey bee colonies, but no empirical data are available on the methods they apply in practice. We surveyed 28,409 beekeepers maintaining 507,641 colonies in 30 European countries concerning Varroa control methods. The set of 19 different Varroa diagnosis and control...

Alongside the use of fertilizer and chemical control of weeds, pests, and diseases modern breeding has been very successful in generating cultivars that have increased agricultural production several fold in favorable environments. These typically homogeneous cultivars (either homozygous inbreds or hybrids derived from inbred parents) are bred unde...

Climate change has greatly altered plant habitats, resulting in greater biodiversity loss at different scales. Therefore, it is important to quantify such changes for better monitoring and conservation. In this study, we adapt the EUROMOVE model and its mean stable area indicator (MSAi) to the conditions in the Czech Republic. Our objective was to...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fvets.2021.698976.].

Currently, we expected a altitudinal shift of forest vegetation upward under predicted climate changes impacts to European mountains ecosystems. In this context can be very interesting, that changes in alpine tree line ecotone in high European mountains were induced by human activities relatively often also in history. Probably one of the most impo...

Biodiversity in urban green areas has been widely explored in several bird studies because birds are known to be important bio-indicators. Many studies have investigated the different responses of bird communities to urbanization and land use changes in urban environments. However, there are still important knowledge gaps related to the impacts of...

American foulbrood (AFB) is a dangerous disease of honeybees (Apis mellifera) caused by the spore-forming bacterium Paenibacillus larvae. According to the ERIC (enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus) classification, five genotypes are distinguished, i.e., I, II, III, IV, and V, which differ in their virulence and prevalence in colonies. I...

Despite the growing efficiency of the map-design process in general, tactile mapping has remained peripheral to mainstream cartography. For a specific group of people with visual impairment, however, tactile maps are the only effective way to obtain a complex idea about the geospatial distribution of the surrounding world. As there are numerous spe...

The establishment and success of polyploids are thought to often be facilitated by ecological niche differentiation from diploids. Unfortunately, most studies compared diploids and polyploids, ignoring variation in ploidy level in polyploids. To fill this gap, we performed a large-scale study of 11,163 samples from 1,283 populations of the polyploi...

Publikace je dílem autorského kolektivu odborníků na kartografii a 3D tisk z Katedry geoinformatiky Přírodovědecké fakulty Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci a speciálních pedagogů z Ústavu speciálněpedagogických studií Pedagogické fakulty Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci. Publikace zahrnuje témata: tyfomapy, výrobní technologie, tyflografika, znaky na...

Medicago truncatula (barrel medic) and Pisum sativum subsp. elatius (wild pea) accessions originating from variable environmental conditions in the Mediterranean basin were used to study physical seed dormancy (PY) release. The effect of soil burial on PY release was tested on 112 accessions of medic and 46 accessions of pea over the period of 3 mo...

Seed dormancy and timing of its release is an important developmental transition determining the survival of individuals, populations, and species in variable environments. Medicago truncatula was used as a model to study physical seed dormancy at the ecological and genetics level. The effect of alternating temperatures, as one of the causes releas...

Legumes represent the second most important family of crop plants after grasses, accounting for approximately 27% of the world's crop production. Past domestication processes resulted in a high degree of relatedness between modern varieties of crops, leading to a narrower genetic base of cultivated germplasm prone to pests and diseases. Crop wild r...

Surfaces directly influenced by mining and post-mining have risen to prominence in the field of restoration ecology. It is important to gain a better understanding of sustainable landscape management in lowland European cultural landscapes. Sand and gravel-pit areas were selected as study sites, where mining activities have been the main factor in...

The most frequent natural hazards which have affected the area of the Czech Republic over the last decades have been floods. The floods arise as a result of the accelerated surface runoff from the land use segments which are caused by the increasingly higher occurrence of patches with low or even critically low retention ability. The number of extr...

Land expansion to increase agricultural production in East Africa (Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda) will be limited by climate change. In this study, we predict landscape suitability for chickpea (Cicer arietinum), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), lentil (Lens culinaris), field pea (Pisum sativum) and pigeon pea (Cajanus caja...

Seed dormancy and timing of its release is important developmental transition determining the survival of individual as well as population and species. We used Medicago truncatula as model to study legume seed dormancy in ecological and genomics context. The effect of oscillating temperatures as one of the dormancy release factor was tested over th...

We are now generating exponentially more data from more sources than a few years ago. Big data, an already familiar term, has been generally defined as a massive volume of structured, semi-structured, and/or unstructured data, which may not be effectively managed and processed using traditional databases and software techniques. It could be problem...

The majority of information has a spatial context that can be represented on the map, while maps are presenting the real world in the simplified and generalised way, focusing on the key features or specific topic. For some kinds of users, the map as the representation of the real spatial context is not only the possibility but also the necessity. A...

Spatial information became ordinary for everyday life, for example in different kinds of maps. The majority of maps are produced for reading with eyes. Nevertheless, people with visual impairment, including blind people, perceive the world differently and have an insufficient amount of possible ways how to investigate the surroundings. Creating a t...

The understanding of uncertainty, or the difference between a real geographic phenomenon and the user’s understanding of that phenomenon, is essential for those who work with spatial data. From this perspective, map symbols can be used as a tool for providing information about the level of uncertainty. Nevertheless, communicating uncertainty to the...

Reproductive isolation is an important component of species differentiation. The plastid accD gene coding for the acetyl-CoA carboxylase subunit and the nuclear bccp gene coding for the biotin carboxyl carrier protein were identified as candidate genes governing nuclear-cytoplasmic incompatibility in peas. We examined the allelic diversity in a set...

Honey bees are the most important managed pollinators and provide income because of bee products. In Austria and Czechia, we monitored winter losses of honey bee colonies and also collected information on the apicultural sector, hive management, population dynamics and treatment against the mite Varroa destructor from 2013-14 to 2016-17. Numbers of...

Spatial variability of ecotones has resulted in problematic modelling, analysis and visualization of these landscape forms. Their spatial variability and fuzzy character cause uncertain and problematic handling in GIScience. Uncertainty of ecotones in the landscape arises from many sources, including complexities inherent to the ecosystems and thei...

Background Seed germination is one of the earliest key events in the plant life cycle. The timing of transition from seed to seedling is an important developmental stage determining the survival of individuals that influences the status of populations and species. Because of wide geographical distribution and occurrence in diverse habitats, wild p...

Pea, one of the founder crops from the Near East, has two wild species: Pisum sativum subsp. elatius, with a wide distribution centered in the Mediterranean, and P. fulvum, which is restricted to Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Using genome wide analysis of 11,343 polymorphic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on a set of wild P....

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194056.].

Knowledge of current genetic diversity and mating systems of crop wild relatives (CWR) in the Fertile Crescent is important in crop genetic improvement, because western agriculture began in the area after the cold-dry period known as Younger Dryas about 12,000 years ago and these species are also wild genepools of the world’s most important food cr...

Mantel correlograms (Legendre & Legendre 2012) showing the scale of variation in the correlation of either environment with geography (a) and Fst with geography (b) and environment (c) using eight geographic distance classes of equal width (50 km) and seven environmental distance classes of unequal width to overcome the problem of the low number of...

Selfing rates of the studied populations in relation to the probability of occurrence in the current and future (CCSM4 rcp6.0) projected climatic niche. (DOCX)

GPS data for 59 wild pea populations. (PDF)

Principal component analysis (PCA) of molecular data. (DOCX)

Results of spatial autocorrelation analysis showing mean kinship coefficient (Ritland 1996) between samples, that are divided into 20 distance groups according to pairwise geographical distance. Black points show mean distance of the distance groups. (DOCX)

Complete DARTseq dataset. (ZIP)

WorldClim extracted bioclimatic variables and geographical distances of studied 14 populations. (PDF)

Summary of DARTseq analysis. Percentage of observed (Hobs), expected (Hexp) and missing datapoints derived from all and polymorphic DARTseq loci per 14 studied populations are shown. (PDF)

Inter-population pairwise Fst (above diagonal, ANOVA approach) and geographical distances (bellow diagonal, km). (PDF)

The effectiveness of protected areas to conserve biodiversity depends on conservation management strategies and their application, usually to specific protected areas. This paper presents the results of an assessment of the conservation management strategy for a protected mountain area dominated by Norway spruce forests. The study was based on the...

There is growing interest in the conservation and utilization of crop wild relatives (CWR) in international food security policy and research. Legumes play an important role in human health, sustainable food production, global food security, and the resilience of current agricultural systems. Pea belongs to the ancient set of cultivated plants of t...

European beech-dominated forests are crucial for maintaining biodiversity in forested mountain landscapes of the European temperate zone. This paper presents the results of research and assessment of management strategy for mountain beech-dominated forests in the Jeseníky Mountains (Czech Republic). Our approach is based on combining research on hi...

Remote sensing data analysis to infer land cover and the subsequent modelling of land use change are subject to uncertainties, which may have an impact on the accuracy of future land-use predictions. Part of these uncertainties come from the visual interpretation of remote sensing data as during this phase a specific knowledge and expertise are cru...

This paper presents results of a study focused on using the increased predation pressure of avian raptors for biocontrol of local populations of the common vole (Microtus arvalis) in Haná (Czech Republic), a region of traditional agriculture in central Europe. Five raptor perches per hectare were installed on fields (total number of perches install...

Predicted climate change can significantly affect ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. Possibilities of predicting climate change effects on growing conditions of crops are therefore sought for practical reasons. The aim of the present study is to contribute to the current discussions about the impact of climate change on agriculture. The...

The results of an analysis of land use development in the Morava River floodplain (Czech Republic) using GIS from 1836 to the present, are the subject of this article. The results are based on the analysis of historical maps, using the landscape matrix assessment of the Morava River floodplain. The final analyses were processed from land use maps o...

The remnants of primeval Norway spruce forests in the European temperate zone are crucial for maintaining forest biodiversity in high mountain landscapes. This paper presents results of a multidisciplinary research and evaluation project on the management practices for mountain spruce forests in the Natura 2000 site (National Nature Reserve Serak-K...

Illegal dumping has become an increasingly significant environmental problem throughout the Czech Republic and also in Prague. The waste is disposed in areas such as vacant lots, along roadways, alleys, city and county parks, ravines, construction sites. The challenge for cities dealing with illegal dumping is that it is tough to identify when it w...

Recent advances in 3D printing technology and increasing accessibility to 3D printers make it possible to relatively easily create many physical models to support classroom instruction. Terrain models are a good example of this potential in geography education. Current 3D printers are capable of creating realistic 3D objects, using elevation data f...