Jan Pokorný

Abstract: This paper suggests the unilaterally-defined value concept of ecosystem services as ‘benefits’ – also referred to as ‘Nature’s contributions to people’ in recent IPBES research – should be counterbalanced by a transparent and valid assessment of the costs from anthropogenically degrading land-use change. The authors argue that conversions...

Scientific innovation is overturning conventional paradigms of forest, water, and energy cycle interactions. This has implications for our understanding of the principal causal pathways by which tree, forest, and vegetation cover (TFVC) influence local and global warming/cooling. Many identify surface albedo and carbon sequestration as the principa...

Eutrophication due to high load of nutrients from the catchment is significant worldwide problem causing impairment of water ecosystems and water quality. The reason is tight connection of eutrophication with photosynthetic biomass production of blue green algae resulting in extreme changes of oxygen level, anoxia at the bottom and release of toxic...

Destabilization of the water cycle threatens human lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile our understanding of whether and how changes in vegetation cover could trigger transitions in moisture availability remains incomplete. This challenge calls for better evidence as well as for the theoretical concepts to describe it. Here we briefly summarize the the...

The neoclassical, unilaterally-defined value concept of ecosystem services (ES) as ‘benefits’ must be counterbalanced by a transparent and valid assessment of thermodynamic costs that result from degrading mature climax ecosystems. It is because willingness to pay-based methods of ES valuations produce unsustainable value relations that promote con...

In eastern Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, historic policies led to large, monocropped agricultural landscapes resulting in degradation of traditional landscapes. In the last 20 years, the expansion of urban and industrial areas has added to this degradation. The growing interest in nature‐based solutions, including water‐retention measu...

This article shows how to restore Central European natural capital effectively. Water in the landscape is primarily sustained by vegetation and soil, most effectively by natural forests and only secondarily by artificial reservoirs. The authors document these facts using a case study from the Želivka River basin (Švihov reservoir), which collects s...

Destabilization of the water cycle threatens human lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile our understanding of whether and how changes in vegetation cover could trigger abrupt transitions in moisture regimes remains incomplete. This challenge calls for better evidence as well as for the theoretical concepts to describe it. Here we briefly summarise the t...

The large ecosystems (region, country, and planet) have many properties common with complex systems. The main such characteristics include dynamic instability (e.g. weather dependence), weak causality (many possible causes per event) and event driven behavior (especially in arid and semi-arid areas). This paper focuses attention on modeling ecosyst...

'Novel ecosystem' is a concept which was introduced in the 21st Century to describe ecosystems heavily modified by humans, about 15 years after 'ecohydrology' had been introduced as concept within UNESCO IHP, to facilitate the sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems by humans and about 5 years after the concept of IHP 'Demonstration Sites' had...

Urban greenery substantially influences the distribution of solar energy in urban areas and thus plays an irreplaceable role in creating local climate. This paper introduces the principles of urban vegetation functioning as a perfect air conditioning system that efficiently cools the environment and balances temperatures through evapotranspiration....

Floodplain forests are considered important forest ecosystems, and providers of ecosystem functions and services. The subject of this research was to assess the level of provision of five selected ecosystem functions (climate regulation and regulation of short water cycle, biomass production, oxygen production, and carbon sequestration) and biodive...

The struggle for mitigation of global climate changes is aimed mostly on CO 2 emissions, while the role of vegetation having strong impact on water retention in the landscape and cooling of environment stays out of the focus. The reason is human illiteracy of plant role in our environment having roots already in school education. The vegetation use...

Technology enhanced interdisciplinary learning unit on ecological role of plant transpiration was tested in this study to explore its effectiveness. The students worked with pc programmed USB humidity, air temperature-sensors and evaluated graphically the data. They had to explain the results of the outdoor measurement by known concepts obtained th...

Vegetation has a significant cooling effect on local climate and contributes to the retention of water in the landscape. Surprisingly, this significant environmental topic is completely omitted from the Czech science curriculum. To introduce this topic into the curriculum it is necessary to first educate the future science teachers. Our paper prese...

The role of wetlands and forests in climate and climate change is usually considered as a part of their functions as source or sink of greenhouse gases. However, the permanent vegetation in these systems is an active factor that, through the process of evapotranspiration, directly influences climate as well. Wet vegetation transforms solar radiatio...

Three small catchments (each c. 2 km 2) with different land cover (drained pasture, wetland and spruce forest) located in the Šumava Mountains in the Czech Republic (altitude 780-1026 m) were monitored continuously for 20 years. The aim of the study was to evaluate the aging of different types of land cover landscape in terms of soil acidification...

The results of long-term screening of sediments from the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2017 are presented, more than 80% of the samples of which were taken from fishponds. The total sediment volume of Czech Republic fishponds is estimated to be 197 mil. m³. Quality of the sediment is impacted by numerous factors. Sediment may be used for land applica...

The results of a broader notion of value for measuring ecosystem services (ESs) are presented, as recently demanded by R. Costanza, with attention to the biophysical, thermodynamic aspects of value. The unifying basis in any ecosystem is the solar energy inflow and the growing efficiency of its use with higher stages of self-organized succession pr...

Since the 1990s, the territory of the Šumava National Park (Czech Republic) has faced significant changes in land cover, especially deforestation, in conjunction with several bark beetle disturbances and hurricane Kyrill in 2007. The aim of the study is to review the hydrological and climatic function of the forest and deforestation impacts on the...

Způsoby hospodaření, využití území, přítomnost a stav vegetace ovlivňují toky energie, vody a látek v krajině, jak dokumentují výsledky monitoringu tří malých povodí (200 ha) s různým stavem vegetačního pokryvu v JV části Šumavy. Z dvacetiletého monitoringu vyplývá, že z povodí s převažujícími odvodněnými pastvinami odtéká 60 % vody spadlé ve srážk...

Wetlands are unique and productive ecosystems that perform essential ecological functions. They cover only 6% of the earth's surface, yet they play a crucial role in maintenance and improvement of water quality; controlling soil erosion and floods, regulating the hydrological cycle and retention of nutrients and carbon. Wetlands also contribute to...

The interactions between wetlands and the hydrological cycle are well known with increasing attention being focused on environmental flows and the links between surface and ground water. The relationships between the climate and the water regime in wetlands has also been increasingly investigated, including from a methodological side given the unce...

This paper deals with the empirical analysis of the effect of the green vegetation to the hydrometeorological parameters of the urban environment (especially temperature) and its subsequent analysis for comparison with UHI (Urban heat island). UHI is the issue of large cities with excessive temperature during the summer months. For the comparison w...

East African wetlands are naturally dominated by papyrus, the world's fastest growing herbaceous plant, reaching up to 5 m in height and 3 kg m⁻² of standing biomass per year. While its provisioning services are well-known, papyrus plays a less evident role in supporting tropical swamp ecosystems by controlling nutrient balances as well as hydrolog...

Forest-driven water and energy cycles are poorly integrated into regional, national, continental and global decision-making on climate change adaptation, mitigation, land use and water management. This constrains humanity's ability to protect our planet's climate and life-sustaining functions. The substantial body of research we review reveals that...

The chapter explains bacics of wetlands hydrology and bioclimatology.

The interactions between wetlands and the hydrological cycle are well known with increasing attention being focused on environmental flows and the links between surface and ground water. The relationships between the climate and the water regime in wetlands has also been increasingly investigated, including from a methodological side given the unce...

The role of plants in global climate change discussions is usually considered only in terms of the albedo and sinks/sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The main aim of this review article is to summarize the entire impact of vegetation on the climate change. It describes quantitatively the energy balance of vegetated surfaces and the effect...

Drainage and loss of wetland sites is a major problem of the agricultural landscape, as it reduces the landscape’s ability to retain water, nutrients, matter, and minimize erosion. With this in mind, the issue of the ability of wet sites to retain radionuclides and contaminated water in the case of a radiation accident was studied. In 2013, field r...

This chapter deals with a largely unrecognised service of wetlands – their role in regulating air temperature through evapotranspiration. We explain quantitatively how solar energy striking the earth’s surface is dissipated by water (expressed in energy units (W m−2)) in three processes: dissolution-precipitation of salts, disintegration-recombinat...

Wetlands are unique and productive ecosystems that perform essential ecological functions. They cover only 6 % of the earth’s surface, yet they play a crucial role in maintenance and improvement of water quality; controlling soil erosion and floods, regulating the hydrological cycle and retention of nutrients and carbon. Wetlands also contribute to...

Fishponds are shallow water bodies the construction of which started in Central Europa in the Middle Ages. Varying in size from less than 1 hectare to several hundred hectares, fishponds have become an integrated landscape component in cultivated regions. In some of them, systems of fishponds play a principal hydrological role. These constructed we...

This study examines the impact of plant cover on water and energy exchange between land and atmosphere in the T?ebo? Biosphere Reserve, Czech Republic. Energy fluxes, evapotranspiration and evaporative fraction were determined over typical crops of agriculture landscape and compared with fluxes in an adjacent wet meadow. The results show distinct d...

The aim of this study is to demonstrate and emphasize the importance of wetlands and permanent vegetation in an agriculture landscape. We compared functional aspects (surface temperature, wetness, and vegetation) of seven different cadastres (administrative units) in two distinctive regions in the Czech Republic. In terms of land cover, one is repr...

The aim of this study is to show the importance of permanent vegetation in landscape in terms of surface temperature. Indicators of key landscape functions (surface temperature, wetness, and biomass content) were monitored from May to September in five catchments with different vegetation covers. The analysis of Landsat satellite data illustrates t...

Energy fluxes, including net radiation, latent heat flux and sensible heat flux were determined on clear days during the vegetative period in four types of land cover: wet meadow, pasture, arable field, and an artificial concrete surface. The average net radiation ranged between 123 W m(-2) at the concrete surface and 164 W m(-2) at the wet meadow....

Forests provide many supporting, regulating and cultural services. Extensive environmental changes have resulted in a substantial loss or degradation of forest ecosystem services (ES). Unclear interactions of climate-change phenomena make it difficult to estimate forest ES. Research on interactive effects of climate change and air pollution has bec...

Surface temperature (Ts) is directly related to the capacity of every ecosystem to direct energy to different heat fluxes. Vegetation with a sufficient supply of water is able to cool down the surface by enhancing the latent heat flux via evapotranspiration. We chose seven types of land covers common in a temperate agricultural landscape and used a...

Recent innovations in the briquetting of carbonized biomass have the potential to improve the efficacy of papyrus as a fuel source. Selective harvesting of only mature stems may prove more sustainable than experimental clear-cutting approaches to regeneration pursued in earlier studies, whilst still providing up to 90 % of available biomass. Brique...

The present area of European wetlands is only a fraction of their area before the start of large-scale human colonization of Europe. Many European wetlands have been exploited and managed for various purposes. Large wetland areas have been drained and reclaimed mainly for agriculture and establishment of human settlements. These threats to European...

This paper presents an integrated approach to landscape functioning assessment combining energy efficiency and hydrochemical balance studies. Energy balance is expressed by surface temperature while hydrochemical balance is illustrated by electric conductivity and selected hydrochemical parameters. Six model sub-watersheds with different land use s...

Transpiration, evapotranspiration and evaporative fraction (EF) were measured in a temperate zone wetland dominated by Phalaris arundinacea L. under extremely high temperature and intense irradiation conditions. The infrared (IR) camera recorded no temperature extremes within the stand, indicating that the stand was capable of regulating the overhe...

This paper proposes three qualitative models that were applied for modeling of Small Water Cycle violation in ecosystem of Trebon region, South Bohemia. SWC refers to the behavior of the local ecosystem (e.g., the Trebon region), in which the volume of water that comes into the ecosystem is evaporated and falls back into this system. SWC is charact...

The distribution of macrophytes in shallow lakes and ponds is subject to zonation. A typical zonation of the littoral of Scandinavian lakes under oligotrophic conditions include, from the lake surface to the lowest part of the littoral, helophytes, nymphaeids, elodeids and isoetids. With increasing pollution and eutrophication of lakes leading to i...

For removal of nutrient-rich sediment from polluted and irreversibly damaged lakes, suction dredgers have been constructed to meet the demands formulated by limnologists. This limnological-technological cooperation has aimed at the precision dredging of sediment strata responsible for the internal nutrient loading of lake ecosystems. Suction dredgi...

Temperature is a limiting factor for plant reproduction under harsh conditions. Using an infrared camera, we studied temperature distribution in three early flowering light-coloured species of markedly different morphology. The influence of three environmental factors (temperature of the ambient air, temperature of the ground and irradiance) on the...

Air temperature and precipitation changes in the decades 1961–2006 at Wet Meadows wetland ecosystem near Třeboň, South Bohemia were compared with the changes in these characteristics at other stations in the Czech Republic. Mean daily maximum air temperature measured during the vegetation growing season at wetland station Wet Meadows rose from 19·7...

Since wetlands are ecosystems that have an ample supply of water, they play an important role in the energy budgets of their respective landscapes due to their capacity to shift energy fluxes in favor of latent heat. Rates of evapotranspiration in wetlands are commonly as high as 6-15 mm day⁻¹, testifying to the large amount of energy that is dissi...

Transpiration of a central European endemic tree species, Pinus rotundata Link, growing on a wooded peat bog in the Třeboň Basin, Czech Republic, was studied in 1999–2000. Transpiration was measured by sap flow techniques (heat field deformation method) on individual trees and scaled up to stand level. The radial patterns of sap flow density showed...

A decrease in total area of tropical forests is considered as a significant factor that influences landscape functioning, including the hydrological cycle; it contributes to climate change, and has many other consequences. This paper presents the extent of deforestation in Nakuru and Naivasha region (Rift Valley, Central Kenya) between the years 19...

Fluctuations of water level and the hydrological regime of Lake Kyoga influence the dynamics and occurrence of wetlands and water reservoirs within its surroundings. During the last 20 years many of them have become nearly entirely overgrown and afflicted by siltation. The aim of the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries in Uganda...

Ecosystems use solar energy for self-organisation and cool themselves by exporting entropy to the atmosphere as heat. These energy transformations are achieved through evapotranspiration, with plants as 'heat valves'. In this study, the dissipative process is demonstrated at sites in the Czech Republic and Belgium, using landscape temperature data...

This paper documents the effects of development in Kenya and its subsequent influence on surface temperatures. The assumption is that deforestation leads to a decrease in evapotranspiration, and causes an observed temperature increase. The study was realised in the Mau Forest of Central Kenya, where extensive deforestation over the past 20 years ha...

Monitoring the dissipation of the daily pulse of solar energy is one of the ways to assess functionality in landscapes. The temperature of the land cover indicates both balances among fluxes of solar energy (reflection, latent, and sensible heat) and conditions for matter retention in the landscape. Temperature is distributed across landscape depen...

Brom, J. & Pokorný, J. 2009: temperature and humidity characteristics of two willow stands, a peaty meadow and a drained pasture and their impact on landscape functioning. Boreal Env. Res. 14: 389–403. Shrubs and herbal wetland stands have a very important influence on microclimatic condi-tions and short water cycling. However, they have received v...

Water cycle has always been substantially influenced by humans. Majority of the surface waters are not anymore in their natural status. Water management has led to substantial changes in water species compositions, water chemism, as well as water bodies’ morphology. Human interventions in the water cycle (drainage of landscape, amelioration of wate...

Changes in the chemistry of bulk precipitation and stream water between 1999 and 2006 are described for small drained, wetland and forest catchments located within Šumava Mountains (Bohemian Forest) in south-west of the Czech Republic. The chapter is focused on interpretation of hydrochemical trends in selected time periods, especially on effect of...

Data on the biomass and net primary production by aquatic macrophytes, collected in Central and Eastern European wetlands and standing shallow waters during 1960s, have recently been evaluated from the viewpoint of carbon content and its accumulation by the macrophytes. The macrophyte habitats are classified according to their nutrient status into...

INTRODUCTIONLIFE-FORMS OF AQUATIC MACROPHYTESPRACTICAL ASPECTSPRODUCTIVITYDECOMPOSITIONNUTRIENT CONTENTTHE ECOPHYSIOLOGICAL ROLE OF MACROPHYTES IN LAK ECOSYSTEMSPHOTOSYNTHETIC PRODUCTION IN SUBMERSED MACROPHYTESMACROPHYTES AND ASSOCIATED BIOTADEVELOPMENT OF MACROPHYTE STANDS IN RELATION TO ANTHROPOGENIC IMPACTSAQUATIC WEEDSCOMMERCIAL USES OF AQUATI...

A holistic approach, based on the ETR model, has been tested in the area of three catchments with different land cover and landscape management, on the right bank of Lipno water reservoir. The results confirm that holistic concept needs to be considered as a perspective for evaluation of landscape complexes when assisted by the methods of remote se...

Changes in land cover temperatures as a result of anthropogenic intervention in the water regime in selected localities of the Šumava mountains (the Czech Republic) were identified. The research was conducted in two subcatchments of similar size, altitude and relief. The subcatchment of the Bonarův stream was chosen as an area affected by water dra...

Restored Mlynsky potok (=brook) is located on the right bank of the Lipno Reservoir near the border with Austria and it is a part of the Danube watershed. Restoration of the streambed was carried out in November 1998. The total length of the restored streambed was 1 692 m. For the restoration of the stream, 4 types of objects were selected: 1) roug...

We studied a landscape damage after mining in North-West Bohemia and suggest strategies of restoration. We go out from hypothesis, that landscape is formed like a stabilized live system with optimalized flow of matter and energy. Colonization of landscape disturbs these natural functions moderately, but opencast mining in some places these function...