Jana Doudová

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague | CULS · Department of Ecology

Understanding the seasonal dynamics of the forest herb layer and the factors that influence it is essential for predicting how the forest ecosystem, including mutualistic interactions, will respond to global change. However, to date, no research has investigated how understorey phenological guilds respond to major environmental threats and forest i...

Open forests are among the world's most species-rich ecosystems but these are now suffering from strong environmental pressure. With the increasing frequency of drought events accompanying climate change, open forests are now at high risk of canopy openness, an associated increase in nutrient load, and a consequent reordering of the plant community...

Floodplain forests offer a diversity of habitats and resources for a very wide range of plant and animal species. They also offer many benefits to humankind and are considered essential to the mitigation of the effects of climate change. Nevertheless, throughout the world they are suffering the most intense of anthropogenic pressures so are, of all...

Forest ecosystems are commonly characterised by a hierarchy of resources. During a disturbance of a forest community, increased light availability in the understorey can support competitive interactions at the expense of facilitation. This may overwhelm the role of belowground resource heterogeneity in maintaining species coexistence and so result...

Species contributing high proportions to community biomass strongly influence ecosystem processes within the community. Studies have shown that dominant species may serve as nurse plants, helping to ensure biomass stability of the subordinate species under stress conditions. The question is widely debated as to whether either niche differentiation...

The centre–periphery hypothesis (CPH) predicts a decrease in population performance from the centre of the species range towards the edge, hindering further species expansion. To overcome ecological limitation, local adaptation of peripheral populations is assumed necessary to extend niche space and thus to potentially facilitate species’ range exp...

Aim The Holocene history of annual plant species is at best shadowy because, for most, the palaeobotanical data are scarce or absent. Hence, there is limited information on their glacial refugia and postglacial colonization pathways. Also, little is known on how human activity has affected their expansion. Here, we outline the joint influences of p...

The stress-gradient hypothesis predicts a switch from competition to facilitation, under increasing environmental stress. However, it is unclear how important is the change in competition-facilitation balance (i.e., the net outcome of plant-plant interactions) along the stress gradient in the regulation of community temporal stability (i.e., the in...

Aim Differences in local β‐diversity (i.e., within‐site β‐diversity) along climatic and biogeographical gradients may result from regional differences in the importance of local community assembly processes (e.g. dispersal limitation and habitat filtering) or from regional differences in species pool sizes (i.e. species potentially able to colonize...

Data from replacement experiment. (XLSX)

Data from heterocarpy experiment. (XLSX)

Heterocarpy enables species to effectively spread under unfavourable conditions by producing two or more types of fruit differing in ecological characteristics. Although it is frequent in annuals occupying disturbed habitats that are vulnerable to invasion, there is still a lack of congeneric studies addressing the importance of heterocarpy for spe...

Studies of perennial plants generally search for a seed size vs. seed number trade-off. Surprisingly, the fact that perennials may replace an investment in large seeds by the allocation to vegetative propagation has not yet been investigated as an additional pathway enabling species coexistence. We focused on the mechanisms of coexistence in Carex...

1.Past management practices may continue to influence ecosystem functions and processes for decades, centuries or even longer after they have been abandoned. Until now, few researchers have attempted experiments which test the effects of restoring some of these past management practices on long-term community developmental trajectories. 2.Strong e...

Abstract Aim: Formalized classifications synthesizing vegetation data at the continental scale are being attempted only now, although they are of key importance for nature conservation planning. Therefore, we aim to provide a vegetation classification and to describe themain biogeographical patterns of floodplain forests and alder carrs in Europe....

Seed banks may play a crucial role in the maintenance of community diversity, but their role on semi-natural grasslands, one of the most species rich habitats in Europe, is usually unexplored in population and community studies. We aim to clarify how local factors and topography influence seed bank successional patterns on semi-natural alluvial mea...

We investigated 39 previously developed Betula, Alnus, and Corylus simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers for their utility in the cross-generic amplification of two European alder species, i.e., Alnus glutinosa and A. incana. Of these markers, ten loci had successful amplification within Alnus species. Finally, we designed two multiplexes composed o...

Background/aims: Recently, new palaeoecological records supported by molecular analyses and palaeodistributional modelling have provided more comprehensive insights into plant behaviour during the last Quaternary cycle. We reviewed the migration history of species of subgenus Alnus during the last 50,000 years in Europe with a focus on (1) a gener...

The ability of a species to adapt to sub-optimal conditions at the margin of its distribution range and to cope with environmental stress is considered to be important for its successful geographic expansion. To ascertain the roles of phenotypic differentiation and plasticity in the expansion of the annual Atriplex tatarica, we compared plants from...

Background and Aims The heterocarpic species Atriplex tatarica produces two types of seeds. In this study, how basic population genetic parameters correlate with seed germinability under various experimental conditions was tested. Methods Population genetic diversity was ascertained in eight populations of A. tatarica by assessing patterns of vari...

Keywords: aerial photograph / Alnus glutinosa (L.) Gaertn. / dendrochronology / land abandonment / secondary succession / wetland Abstract • The secondary succession of wet grasslands to communities of alder carr dominated by Alnus glutinosa was recorded in different parts of Europe during the 20th century. However, knowledge of such development of...

Atriplex tatarica is a heterocarpic annual native to a wide area of Middle and western Central Asia, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. It is an early successional species of disturbed habitats, in Central Europe mostly occupying road margins and waste places. This paper deals with taxonomic status, morphology, distribution, ecology, and...