Jan Leps

University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice · Department of Botany

A popular approach assessing trait–environment relationships is the Community Weighted Means (CWMs) method, which evaluates changes in communities' average trait values along gradients. Recently, the use of CWM as response in general linear models have been criticized for inflated Type I errors. In some scenarios of compositional turnover along a...

Theories explaining community assembly assume that biotic and abiotic filters sort species into communities based on the values of their traits and are thus based on between‐species trait variability (BTV). Nevertheless, these filters act on individuals rather than on species. Consequently, the selection is also influenced by intraspecific trait va...

Blog post found at: https://vegsciblog.org/2024/08/22/plant-cover-relationship-to-biomass/ This post refers to the article The convex relationship between plant cover and biomass: Implications for assessing species and community properties by Pan et al. published in the Journal of Vegetation Science (https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13288)

Aim Understanding the mechanisms promoting resilience in plant communities is crucial in times of increasing disturbance and global environmental change. Here, we present the first meta‐analysis evaluating the relationship between functional diversity and resilience of plant communities. Specifically, we tested whether the resilience of plant commu...

Questions Cover and biomass serve as common measures of species abundance in plant ecology. However, the underlying relationship between these two measures and its implications remain poorly understood. This makes results based on cover and biomass difficult to compare. Locations Wet meadow, southeast of České Budějovice, Czech Republic (48°57′ N,...

Appendix S1. Reasons why we expect the power coefficient b to be larger than 1. Appendix S2. Reasons why we expect CV is higher for biomass, diversity is higher for cover. Appendix S3. Sampling method of plant cover and biomass data. Appendix S4. Picture showing the collection of plant cover data. Appendix S5. The quadrat for relevés with a gri...

A growing number of studies have demonstrated that biodiversity is a strong and positive predictor of ecosystem temporal stability by simultaneously affecting multiple underlying mechanisms of stability, that is dominance, asynchrony and averaging effects. However, to date, no study has disentangled the relative role of these key mechanisms of stab...

Aims Oligotrophic grasslands are habitats that host among the most diverse plant communities in Europe. Altering management regimes by either intensifying or ceasing management is known to decrease plant diversity. Yet, despite its importance for the recovery of plant communities after disturbances, little is known about whether seed banks are also...

Master's programme in Ecology for foreign students - see www.prf.jcu.cz/ecology offers. Students are trained in modern ecology research. The courses are focused on ecological theory and analysis as well as interpretation of ecological data using modern computational approaches. The strongest emphasis is on interactions among organisms and with thei...

1. How biodiversity underpins ecosystem resistance (i.e. ability to withstand environmental perturbations) and recovery (i.e. ability to return to a pre-perturbation state), and thus, stability under extreme climatic events is a timely question in ecology. To date, most studies have focussed on the role of taxonomic diversity, neglecting how commun...

Aim Identifying the drivers of ecological stability is critical for ensuring the maintenance of ecosystem functioning and services, particularly in a changing world. Different ecological mechanisms by which biological communities stabilize ecosystem functions (i.e. “stabilizing effects”) have been proposed, yet with various theoretical expectations...

Effects of plant diversity on grassland productivity, or overyielding, are found to be robust to nutrient enrichment. However, the impact of cumulative nitrogen (N) addition (total N added over time) on overyielding and its drivers are underexplored. Synthesizing data from 15 multi-year grassland biodiversity experiments with N addition, we found t...

Plant diversity effects on community productivity often increase over time. Whether the strengthening of diversity effects is caused by temporal shifts in species-level overyielding (i.e., higher species-level productivity in diverse communities compared with monocultures) remains unclear. Here, using data from 65 grassland and forest biodiversity...

1. How biodiversity underpins ecosystem resistance (i.e., ability to withstand environmental perturbations) and recovery (i.e., ability to return to a pre-perturbation state) and thus stability under extreme climatic events is a timely question in ecology. To date, most studies have focused on the role of taxonomic diversity, neglecting how communi...

Conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) is one of the processes that can maintain high species diversity by decreasing population growth rates at high densities, and can thereby favour locally less common species over common ones. But the methods for detection of CNDD can produce false signals, in particular, overestimate CNDD, due to error...

Mobility is highly species-specific and individual species mobility can be predicted by species traits, yet this topic remains largely understudied. We analyzed data on species presences/absences in permanent subplots (1m × 1m) within 15 main plots 10m × 10m) over 24 years originating from a grassland biodiversity experiment in Czechia. Plots diffe...

Ants disperse seeds of many plant species adapted to myrmecochory. While advantages of this ant–plant mutualism for myrmecochorous plants (myrmecochores) have been previously studied in temperate region mostly in forests, our study system was a pasture. Moreover, we used a unique combination of observing the effect of ant‐activity suppression on an...

One of J.P. Grime's greatest achievements was demonstrating the importance of the relationship between the environment and plant functional traits for understanding community assembly processes and the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning. A popular approach assessing trait–environment relationships is the community weighted means (CWMs...

Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species' ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, especially across different biomes. We compiled a worldwide collection of long-term permanent vegetati...

If you have a half day or day in České Budějovice and want to make nice botanical excursion, then it is worth to visit the nature reserve Horní luka, just below the Kleť peak. It is a nice oligotrophic wet meadow, with quite a few species, like orchids (Dactylorrhiza fuchsii, Plathantherra bifolia), phytogeographically interesting species Phyteuma...

Conservation strategies often assume that the total number of species at a specific location can be used as a proxy for other biodiversity dimensions, such as, the presence of rare and threatened species. However, the validity of this assumption remains unclear, particularly at the plot scale. Here, we used~17,000 vegetation plots sampled across th...

Community composition is limited by a species' ability to reach, establish and survive on a site. Establishment and survival are constrained by both abiotic conditions and biotic interactions that operate together on local scales. They decide which species from the pool will form the community. For this reason, it is very important to clearly defin...

The book is translation of the book "Lepš, J., & Šmilauer, P. (2020). Biostatistics with R: an introductory guide for field biologists. Cambridge University Press." More information at https://www.ropipublications.com/biostatistics-with-r/

Revealing the role of biodiversity in ecosystem functioning (BEF) has been a major focus of ecological research over recent decades. In general, results from artificially assembled communities point to the important role of biodiversity showing that loss of species has a negative effect on various ecosystem functions (mostly assessed by above‐groun...

Invertebrate herbivory affects the composition of meadow communities by differentially decreasing the fitness of individual species. The ability of individual species to resist herbivore pressure depends on their traits, which are often phylogenetically structured, and changes seasonally. We conducted a field study assessing invertebrate herbivory...

While biodiversity is expected to enhance multiple ecosystem functions (EFs), the different roles of multiple biodiversity dimensions remain difficult to disentangle without carefully designed experiments. We sowed plant communities with independent levels of functional (FD) and phylogenetic diversities (PD), combined with different levels of ferti...

Lake George is a highly monitored, oligotrophic lake that experiences widespread tourism in the summer months. The southern basin has more shoreline development than the northern basin, resulting in a south to north gradient of anthropogenic impairment. This study aimed to assess differences in nearshore diatom communities regarding gradients of wa...

Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species’ ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, specially across different ecosystems. To address this, we compiled a global collection of long-term p...

Despite great progress in our understanding of the mechanisms governing ecosystem stability in local communities, we still lack knowledge at a larger spatial scale. Studying the stability of metacommunities requires assessing the temporal stability and synchrony of populations across space and organizational levels. Previous attempts to disentangle...

Invasive alien species can have severe negative impacts on natural ecosystems. These impacts may be particularly pronounced within ecological communities, where alien species can cause local extinctions. However, it is unclear whether individual alien plant species consistently occur in species-poor or species-rich communities across broad geograph...

Foliar endophytic bacteria and fungi are increasingly being recognized as important drivers of plant host phenotype—affecting a wide range of eco‐physiological processes. However, we are still lacking fundamental ecosystem‐level knowledge about the structure, function and inter‐species interactions in endophytic assemblages associated with plant ho...

Analysing temporal patterns in plant communities is extremely important to quantify the extent and the consequences of ecological changes, especially considering the current biodiversity crisis. Long‐term data collected through the regular sampling of permanent plots represent the most accurate resource to study ecological succession, analyse the s...

Purpose Plant species diversity is expected to affect multiple ecosystem functions, such as soil nitrogen (N) availability. However, this effect may be related to the ecological differentiation between coexisting species, often expressed as either functional diversity (FD; diversity in traits) or phylogenetic diversity (PD; diversity in phylogeneti...

Analysing temporal patterns in plant communities is extremely important to quantify the extent and the consequences of ecological changes, especially considering the current biodiversity crisis. Long-term data collected through the regular sampling of permanent plots represent the most accurate resource to study ecological succession, analyse the s...

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...

The relationship between species richness and productivity (SRPR) has been a longstudied and hotly debated topic in ecology. Different studies have reported different results with variable shapes (i.e. unimodal, linear) and directions (i.e. positive, negative) of SRPRs depending on spatial grain (i.e. size of sampling unit for species richness), pr...

Questions Herbivory is a fundamental ecological interaction underlying energy and mass flow between primary producers and consumers. The ecological theory describes plant biomass quality in terms of food for herbivores as a functional effect trait. We asked how leaf functional traits affect insect herbivory in a species-rich meadow community. Loca...

Under global change, how biological diversity and ecosystem services are maintained in time is a fundamental question. Ecologists have long argued about multiple mechanisms by which local biodiversity might control the temporal stability of ecosystem properties. Accumulating theories and empirical evidence suggest that, together with different popu...

Tropical forests are notable for their high species diversity, even on small spatial scales, and right-skewed species and size abundance distributions. The role of individual species as drivers of the spatial organization of diversity in these forests has been explained by several hypotheses and processes, for example, stochastic dilution, negative...

Questions The patterns in plant species abundances and the processes which determine these patterns have been intensively studied. While recent investigations have recognized plant functional traits as important determinants of species abundances, intraspecific trait variability as a driver of species abundance patterns has largely been ignored. Th...

Increased drought is predicted to have a major impact on plant performance under environmental change. Yet leaf hydraulic traits directly related to drought tolerance, such as leaf turgor loss point (πtlp), are under‐represented in trait‐based studies and have been largely overlooked within the main frameworks evaluating trait–trait coordination an...

Competitive exclusion is to be expected between phylogenetically similar species that share traits and resources. However, species may overcome this, either through differentiation of their responses to biotic and abiotic conditions, or by trait differentiation, thus enabling their coexistence. We identified differences in phenotypic traits between...

Our planet is facing significant changes of biodiversity across spatial scales. Although the negative effects of local biodiversity (α diversity) loss on ecosystem stability are well documented, the consequences of biodiversity changes at larger spatial scales, in particular biotic homogenization, that is, reduced species turnover across space (β d...

Grassland ecosystems account for approximately 40% of terrestrial biomes globally. These communities are characterized by a large allocation to belowground biomass, often exceeding its aboveground counterpart. However, this biomass investment cannot be entirely attributed to the acquisitive function of roots. Grassland plants also allocate to non‐a...

Ants can shape vegetation as seed dispersers and ecosystem engineers. When anthills are long-lasting, they are known to change soil and vegetation characteristics. However, it is unclear whether plant species traits and species composition vary between ant guilds and between parts of individual anthills. We compared different aspects of soil and ve...

The Pladias (Plant Diversity Analysis and Synthesis) Database of the Czech Flora and Vegetation was developed by the Pladias project team in 2014-2018 and has been continuously updated since then. The flora section of the database contains critically revised information on the Czech vascular flora, including 13.6 million plant occurrence records, w...

In herbaceous communities which host many perennial species, belowground clonal organs and traits remain largely overlooked in ecosystem functioning studies. However, the belowground compartment is expected to play a key role as the greatest proportion of biomass is allocated belowground. Our main goal was to test whether including underexplored cl...

Aims Ecological theories predict that assembly processes shape communities so that coexisting species may either be functionally more dissimilar (‘divergence’) or more similar (‘convergence’) than expected by chance. Two important factors that are rarely considered in combination are spatial scale and successional stage. Our aim is to identify diff...

Functional trait differences between species are key drivers of community assembly and ecosystem functioning. Quantifying these differences routinely requires using approaches like the Gower distance to combine multiple types of traits into a multi‐trait dissimilarity. Without special care, the Gower distance can however produce a multi‐trait dissi...

https://vegsciblog.org/2020/11/14/to-go-open-access-or-not-to-go/ This Commentary is a part of the series asking the question: should Applied Vegetation Science, the journal owned by IAVS and published by Wiley, become Gold Open Access? For the context and link to other Commentaries, please visit Editorial. Willey suggested that the Applied Veget...

Understanding of causes for recent changes in vegetation structure and species richness of natural habitats is crucial for their maintaining for future generations. However, to avoid misinterpretation of vegetation changes in time, we should be aware of limits and errors of methods used for vegetation sampling. In a specific vegetation type, i.e. s...

Questions Compensatory dynamics are described as one of the main mechanisms that increase community stability, e.g. where decreases of some species on a year‐to‐year basis are offset by an increase in others. Deviations from perfect synchrony between species (asynchrony) have therefore been advocated as an important mechanism underlying biodiversit...

The stability of ecological communities is critical for the stable provisioning of ecosystem services, such as food and forage production, carbon sequestration, and soil fertility. Greater biodiversity is expected to enhance stability across years by decreasing synchrony among species, but the drivers of stability in nature remain poorly resolved....

The stability of ecological communities is critical for the stable provisioning of ecosystem services, such as food and forage production, carbon sequestration, and soil fertility. Greater biodiversity is expected to enhance stability across years by decreasing synchrony among species, but the drivers of stability in nature remain poorly resolved....

!!!ALREADY AVAILABLE FROM THE PUBLISHER AND FROM amazon.co.uk!!! From amazon.com it will be available in August 2020. Biostatistics with R provides a straightforward introduction on how to analyse data from the wide field of biological research, including nature protection and global change monitoring. The book is centred around traditional stati...

Understanding how diversity affects ecosystem stability is crucial for predicting the consequences of continued habitat and biodiversity loss on ecosystem functions and services. Long‐term productivity stability in plant communities is often associated with greater species, phylogenetic or functional diversity, more complex size and age structures,...

The paper is from a special JVS issue on Permanent Plots: the issue should be freely available (till February 2020) on: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1654-1103.Permanent-plots-in-vegetation-science Question Inter‐annual species mobility within a community might support species coexistence in species‐rich ecosystems. We a...

This chapter covers diversity and ecosystem function, with sections on measurement and determination of species diversity, patterns of species richness along gradients, stability, and the causal relationship between diversity and ecosystem functioning.

Species occurrence in a site can be limited by both the abiotic environment and biotic interactions. These two factors operate in concert, but their relative importance is often unclear. By experimentally introducing seeds or plants into competition‐free gaps or into the intact vegetation, we can disentangle the biotic and abiotic effects on plant...

Professor Miroslav Papáček (1953–2019) was an eminent specialist in morphology, taxonomy, systematics, biology and ecology of aquatic and semiaquatic bugs (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Nepomorpha, Gerromorpha). All his career was connected with the Department of Biology, Faculty of Education, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, Czech Republ...

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). Following a previous Long Database Report (Dengler et al. 2018, Phytocoenologia 48, 331–347), we provide here the first update on content and functionality of Gra...

Functional diversity (FD) has the potential to address many ecological questions, from impacts of global change on biodiversity to ecological restoration. There are several methods estimating the different components of FD. However, most of these methods can only be computed at limited spatial scales and cannot account for intraspecific trait varia...

Functional and phylogenetic diversity (FD and PD respectively) of the resident community are expected to exert a key role in community resistance to colonization by surrounding species, and their establishment success. However, few studies have explored this topic experimentally or evaluated the interactive effects of these diversity measures. We i...

Questions We asked whether the competition among community components (a) destabilizes individual components; (b) increases the asynchrony of their fluctuations; and (c) stabilizes the total community biomass. Location Seminatural meadow in South Bohemia, Czech Republic. Methods We used biomass fluctuation data from a 13‐year removal experiment....