Jan Divíšek

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at Masaryk University

In this document, I introduce a dataset of gridded bioclimatic and ENVIREM variables at a spatial resolution of 30 arc-seconds and temporal resolution of 100 years. This dataset covers the European continent (32.5°W–70°E; 32.5°N–82.5°N) and the period from 21,000 to 0 BP. For each 100-year bin, bioclimatic and ENVIREM variables commonly used in spe...

Aim We document realized and potential global species ranges based on empirically vetted species concepts in conjunction with global climate databases and climate suitability modelling. From this we investigate the nature of dispersal barriers and illustrate how they generate ecological uniqueness. Location Holarctic. Methods Fifty‐two small body...

The biogeographic origin of the species‐rich steppe grasslands in central Europe has long been debated. The alternative hypotheses are long‐term species persistence in situ versus immigration from the south‐east, either after the last glacial maximum (LGM) or after the Neolithic landscape deforestation. We ask whether macroclimate‐based models of h...

The relationship between phylogenetic diversity (PD) and functional diversity (FD) is important for understanding the mechanisms of community assembly. The traditional view assumes a coupled (positively correlated) relationship between these two diversity measures, suggesting that competitive exclusion and environmental filtering are important driv...

Aim Various species distributed in the Alps have their disjunct occurrences in the Carpathians. Fossil evidence for some woodland snails of Alpine distribution suggests that they colonized the Carpathians during the Holocene forest optimum or later. Here, we focus on disjunct Carpathian populations of the rock‐dwelling alpine snail Pyramidula saxat...

The biota of North Atlantic islands evokes intriguing questions on its evolution, colonisation routes, and an equilibrium between dispersal limitation and climatic/habitat constraints. While good data on non‐marine snails exist for most of the islands, the data for Greenland were observed mainly between 1850 and 1900. The recorded species have been...

Studying landscape heterogeneity (LH) and its changes over time is crucial for understanding ecosystem dynamics and developing effective strategies for biodiversity conservation and climate change adaptation. However, such studies over large areas and long time periods are rare due to the limited availability of land-cover data. Here, we examine tw...

Modeled modern and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) climate ranges for 47 genetically confirmed small Holarctic land snails documented profound landscape dynamism over the last 21,000 years. Following deglaciation, range areas tended to increase by 50% while isolating barrier widths were cut in half. At the same time, the nature of isolating barriers und...

Elton’s biotic resistance hypothesis posits that species-rich communities are more resistant to invasion. However, it remains unknown how species, phylogenetic and functional richness, along with environmental and human-impact factors, collectively affect plant invasion as alien species progress along the introduction–naturalization–invasion contin...

Elton’s biotic resistance hypothesis posits that species-rich communities are more resistant to invasion. Yet, there is evidence that species richness alone may not fully explain community resistance, as phylogenetic and functional richness, along with environmental factors and human-induced disturbances, also play pivotal roles. Additionally, it r...

Aims: The Raunkiaer's system classifies vascular plants into life forms based on the position of renewal buds during periods unfavourable for plant growth. Despite the importance of Raunkiaer's system for ecological research, a study exploring the diversity and distribution of life forms on a continental scale is missing. We aim to (i) map the dive...

Biodiversity monitoring is crucial for ecosystem conservation, but ground data collection is limited by cost, time, and scale. Remote sensing is a convenient approach providing frequent, near-real-time information with fine resolution over wide areas. According to the Spectral Variation Hypothesis (SVH), spectral diversity (SD) is an effective prox...

The establishment of Arabidopsis as the most important plant model has also brought other crucifer species into the spotlight of comparative research. While the genus Capsella has become a prominent crucifer model system, its closest relative has been overlooked. The unispecific genus Catolobus is native to temperate Eurasian woodlands, from easter...

Alpine ecosystems are hotspots of biodiversity despite their cold climates. Here we investigate spatial patterns in the phylogenetic diversity (i.e. the degree of species relatedness) of European alpine floras and quantify the influence of climatic conditions since the late Pleistocene and historical climatic instability in shaping these patterns....

Biodiversity monitoring is crucial for ecosystem conservation, yet field data collection is limited by costs, time, and extent. Remote sensing represents a convenient approach providing frequent, near-real-time information over wide areas. According to the Spectral Variation Hypothesis (SVH), spectral diversity (SD) is an effective proxy of environ...

Aims We asked how geological substrate affects the distribution of plant species between forest interiors, forest edges, and steppe patches in the forest–steppe landscapes. Specifically, we sought for the presence of the edge effect at the forest–grassland transitions on different substrates. Location Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and...

It is increasingly recognized that the factors facilitating plant invasions depend on the stage along the introduction–naturalization–invasion continuum. Adaptative strategies, that is, combinations of functional traits that represent overall fitness in the face of one or more selection pressures, have shown promise in explaining plant invasions. H...

Aim We examine how the climatic niches of North American tree and tall‐shrub species change after their introduction to Europe and how these shifts affect their potential geographical distributions in the new range. We ask whether patterns of niche shifts differ among species confined to different biomes in North America and whether the expansions...

The occurrence and origin of dry grasslands and their rich biota in the moderately humid Central‐European climate have fascinated scientists for over a century. Modern palaeoecological and phylogeographical data support earlier hypotheses that these grasslands are late Pleistocene relicts and can therefore be considered part of the Eurasian forest–...

The presence of Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) biotic communities without modern counterparts is well known. It is particularly evident in central European fossil LGM land snails whose assemblages represent an odd mix of species that are currently limited to either xeric or wetland habitats. Here we document a genetically verified discovery of the mode...

The article analyses possibilities of using landscape paintings in the studies of land cover changes. It examines 112 paintings from 1728 till 1976 and compares them with existing topographic maps. It compares land cover depicted in the paintings with present landscape and it studies changes of landscape derived from topographic maps from several p...

Aims Biodiversity is traditionally studied mostly at the species level, but biogeographical and macroecological studies at higher taxonomic levels can provide valuable insights into the evolutionary processes at large spatial scales. Our aim was to assess the representation of vascular plant families within different vegetation formations across Eu...

Question Habitat‐specific species pools are shaped by ecological and evolutionary processes such as speciation, extinction, and migration. However, their role is poorly known because of the lack of robust data on species pools across a large number of plant community types and large areas. Here, we analyse a unique dataset of species pools of diagn...

The development of biotic communities since the last glaciation has been shaped by both dramatic climate changes and pathways of species colonisation from glacial refugia. Although the growing body of literature has emerged recently on possible scenarios of postglacial colonisation, less is known about the effect of climate. We analysed the dynamic...

The Pohořská Mountains, a geomorphological subunit of the Novohradské Mountains in the southern part of the Bohemian Massif, represent a unique natural area situated on the border between the Czech Republic and Austria. The area was virtually inaccessible during the Cold War because of its localization close to the Iron Curtain. After 1989, the ext...

Aim Current species‐richness patterns are sometimes interpreted as a legacy of landscape history, but historical processes shaping the distribution of species during the Holocene are frequently omitted in biodiversity models. Here, we test their importance in modelling current species richness of vascular plants in forest and grassland vegetation....

It is generally acknowledged that land-use structure and its changes influence levels of invasion by alien plants across the landscape. In this study, we asked how land-use changes over the last 180 years influenced spatial patterns of alien plant invasions in the Czech Republic. We hypothesize that (i) dynamically changing landscapes with a high l...

Recently available extensive datasets on plant distributions across the whole national floras and on functional traits of such floras, and increasing availability of fine-scale information on the abiotic environment make it possible to explore the trends in plant traits across geographical space and explain them as a function of large-scale environ...

Supporting information for the article Alpha diversity of vascular plants in European forests Article DOI: 10.1111/jbi.13624 Read-only version: https://rdcu.be/bGrNA

Spatial distribution of forest vegetation plots, ranging from 100 to 1,000 m2 in plot size, used as an input dataset for modelling alpha‐diversity patterns (n = 73,134). The colours indicate the total number of vascular plant species recorded per plot (i.e., alpha diversity). For this visualization, alpha‐diversity values displayed on the map were...

Integrated relative importance of predictor variables for explaining alpha‐diversity patterns for all forests and for each forest type separately. The black part of the bars indicates the contribution of the “Mean decrease in node impurity” to the integrated relative importance, while the grey part indicates the contribution of the “Mean decrease i...

Effects of the three top‐ranked predictor variables on alpha diversity for all forests and for each forest type separately (partial dependence plots). The integrated importance scores are shown in parentheses. AET, actual evapotranspiration; PET, potential evapotranspiration; VRM, vector ruggedness measure. The effects of the lower‐ranked predictor...

Predicted alpha diversity of vascular plants across European forests based on Random Forest models for (a) all forests (n = 73,134); (c) deciduous broadleaf forests (n = 54,521); (d) coniferous forests (n = 15,978); and (e) sclerophyllous forests (n = 2,635). All maps are provided in a UTM 5 × 5 km grid, with species numbers predicted for a plot si...

Aim The former continental‐scale studies modelled coarse‐grained plant species‐richness patterns (gamma diversity). Here we aim to refine this information for European forests by (a) modelling the number of vascular plant species that co‐occur in local communities (alpha diversity) within spatial units of 400 m²; and (b) assessing the factors likel...

The search for traits associated with plant invasiveness has yielded contradictory results, in part because most previous studies have failed to recognize that different traits are important at different stages along the introduction–naturalization–invasion continuum. Here we show that across six different habitat types in temperate Central Europe,...

More than 80 tree species native to North America have been introduced to the European continent. Some of them have successfully naturalized there while others become invasive. In this study, we explore what areas and climatic conditions in Europe are the most suitable for successful establishment and naturalization of the North American trees. We...

Biogeographical barriers formed by natural forces over billions of years have been substantially disrupted by human activity, particularly in recent centuries. In response to these anthropogenic changes, global homogenization of biota is observed at an ever-increasing rate, causing environmental and economic losses as well as emerging health risks....

Aim Urban floras are composed of species of different origin, both native and alien, and with various traits and niches. It is likely that these species will respond to the ongoing climate change in different ways, resulting in future species compositions with no analogues in current European cities. Our goal was to estimate potential shifts in pla...

The recent increase in the availability of large vegetation-plot databases has created unprecedented opportunities for analysing and explaining patterns of fine-scale plant species richness across large areas and for individual habitat types. Here we demonstrate how these data can be used to (1) prepare country-wide highresolution maps of species r...

Biogeographical barriers formed by natural forces over the billions of years have been substantially disrupted by human activities particularly in the last centuries. Responding to these anthropogenic changes, biological invasions are observed with ever increasing rate and have become a significant component of global environmental change. Global m...

Vertigo lilljeborgi (Westerlund, 1871) is one of the rarest terrestrial snail species in temperate mainland Europe, where it is traditionally considered a glacial relict. This contrasts with its occurrence in northern Europe where it is a widespread species. This species prefers constantly wet habitats that are neutral to slightly acidic and avoids...

In this study, we explored trait differences among native, naturalized and invasive species in a range of habitat types. We asked whether the naturalized and invasive species are different from the native species if their traits are considered (i) separately and (ii) together in multivariate trait space. To answer these questions, we used 24,935 ve...

This study attempts to explore biogeographical patterns in vertebrate assemblages of the Czech Republic and to delineate faunal biogeographical regions of the country. We focused on native terrestrial species and first explored main gradients in the composition of their assemblages. The first gradient revealed by Principal Coordinate Analysis was b...

The current version of the check-list follows Horsák et al. (2013) with up-to-date modifications supplemented with a reference. Distribution map for each species was constructed based on published data and our knowledge based on unpublished records. So far 251 species of molluscs, including 223 species of gastropods (51 aquatic and 172 terrestrial)...

Aim One of the fundamental tools in biogeography is the classification of the Earth surface into spatially coherent units based on assemblage distinctiveness. However, spatial coherence of biogeographical regions may be scale‐dependent, that is, it may change with changing the size of spatial units used. We ask (1) how the clusters resulting from t...

In connection with the completion of gallows register in Morava area, in spring 2015 was realized an inspection of a place where gallows near Lomnice near Tišnov used to be. The gallows now remains as a destructed construction of a slightly trapezoid shape, with the outer dimensions of 560×570cm, built from anaclastic stones on mortar. The stone wa...

Species richness patterns have always fascinated ecologists and numerous studies attempted to map, explain and predict species richness across large areas. Such studies usually used inventory or atlas based data with coarse spatial resolution, because fine resolution data were not available. Within large areas, our knowledge of species richness pat...

Based on a research the gallows in Tišnov was located on a ridge oj a small southern slope oj an isolated hump called Klucanina. The article discusses the development oj the natural environment oj the site, visibility of the gallows and research operations which were intended to specify the road to the gallows.

We propose the first statistical landscape classification of the Czech Republic based on the distribution of different types of natural habitats (mainly defined in terms of plant communities) that resulted from national habitat mapping. We used occurrences of natural habitats in 2370 grid cells of 5′ longitude × 3′ latitude covering the whole area...

Studies that explore species–environment relationships at a broad scale are usually limited by the availability of sufficient habitat description, which is often too coarse to differentiate natural habitat patches. Therefore, it is not well understood how the distribution of natural habitats affects broad-scale patterns in the distribution of anima...

The book deals with biogeographical division of the Czech Republic. It was elaborated initially for purposes of national and supra-national Ecological Networks. This division has its own hierarchy, consisting of both individual and typological biogeographical units. Higher units (biogeographical province, subprovince, and bioregion) are of individu...

The locality Ledové sluje (Ice Caves) in Podyjí National Park (Czech Republic), with an extensive system of pseudokarst caves, has been known since the mid of 19th century. Many scientific activities (speleological, microclimatological, geophysical, structural engineering, forest ecology etc.) increased in this area after the National Park was decl...