Lubomír Tichý

• Masaryk University

Questions Is there a similarity between successional patterns in abandoned fields identified (a) through analysis of differently aged sites examined at one point in time (chronosequence) and (b) those derived from a limited set of semi‐permanent plots? What is the rate of succession on dry and mesic abandoned fields and how is the participation of...

Question Following a significant disturbance, vegetation development may, or may not reach the desired target. Here, we examine which relevant global environmental factors have a substantial impact on the course of spontaneous vegetation succession, and what their relative relevance is in achieving the desired outcome. Location Worldwide. Methods...

This article describes FloraVeg.EU, a new online database with open‐access information on European vegetation units (phytosociological syntaxa), vegetated habitats, and plant taxa. It consists of three modules. (1) The Vegetation module includes 149 phytosociological classes, 378 orders and 1305 alliances of an updated version of the EuroVegCheckli...

Aims: Developing a hierarchical classification system for classes, orders and alliances of the diverse dry grasslands of the Central and Eastern Balkan Peninsula and translating this into an electronic expert system (ES) for the automatic assignment of plots. Location: Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and northern Greece. Methods: We extra...

Plant macro-remains provide valuable environmental information of the past, but reconstruction of past vegetation is challenging, because a macrofossil sample may include material from various habitats and also because its species composition is biased and incomplete. Therefore, we aimed to propose, test and evaluate an objective tool for data reco...

EXPERT – an algorithm for assigning relevés to plant communities and habitat types in the Netherlands An expert system called EXPERT has been developed for the identification of vegetation plot descriptions (relevés) in the Netherlands. It is online available as freeware on www.synbiosys.alterra.nl. The algorithm runs in JUICE as well as in TURBOV...

Urban areas exert a significant influence on plant species assemblages. The mosaic of different urban land uses is reflected in the distribution patterns of different plant groups. Here we present the results of the first systematic and detailed floristic survey of the city of Brno, Czech Republic. We studied the flora of Brno from 2011 to 2021, an...

Aims: To develop a consistent ecological indicator value system for Europe for five of the main plant niche dimensions: soil moisture (M), soil nitrogen (N), soil reaction (R), light (L) and temperature (T). Study area: Europe (and closely adjacent regions). Methods: We identified 31 indicator value systems for vascular plants in Europe that contai...

Aims Ellenberg-type indicator values are expert-based rankings of plant species according to their ecological optima on main environmental gradients. Here we extend the indicator-value system proposed by Heinz Ellenberg and co-authors for Central Europe by incorporating other systems of Ellenberg-type indicator values (i.e., those using scales comp...

Increasing evidence for the effects of Holocene history on modern biotic communities suggests that current explanations of community patterns and conservation strategies require revisiting. Here we focused on Central European rich fens that are at high risk among mire habitats because of their relatively low environmental stability, and hence sensi...

Rising temperatures may endanger fragile ecosystems because their character and key species show different habitat affinities under different climates. This assumption has only been tested in limited geographical scales. In fens, one of the most endangered ecosystems in Europe, broader pH niches have been reported from cold areas and are expected f...

Plants continuously face stress from ultraviolet-B radiation that can cause chromosomes to fragment. The impact of fragmentation may depend on chromosome type: holocentric chromosomes tolerate fragmentation but monocentric chromosomes do not. Our field experiments on holocentric cyperids and monocentric grasses suggested that holocentric plants mig...

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...

Vládek A., Tichý L., Přidal A. 2021: A new locality with recent occurrences of Megachile parietina in the Czech Republic (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Megachilidae). Klapalekiana 57: 147–150. Megachile (Chalicodoma) parietina (Geoffroy, 1785) is a rare and very endangered dauber bee species in Central Europe. During the last 20 years, it has only been re...

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...

Aim Vegetation types of Mediterranean thermophilous pine forests dominated by Pinus brutia, P. halepensis, P. pinaster, and P. pinea were studied in various areas. However, a comprehensive formal vegetation classification of these forests based on a detailed data analysis has never been developed. Our aim is to provide the first broad‐scale classif...

Aims The machine‐readable formal language of the classification expert systems has become a standard for applying plot assignment rules in vegetation classification. Here we present an efficient algorithm implementing the vegetation classification expert system in the statistical programming language R. Methods and results The principal idea of th...

Aim The EUNIS Habitat Classification is a widely used reference framework for European habitat types (habitats), but it lacks formal definitions of individual habitats that would enable their unequivocal identification. Our goal was to develop a tool for assigning vegetation‐plot records to the habitats of the EUNIS system, use it to classify a Eur...

Transplantation of soil and plant litter has been suggested as a tool to speed up the establishment of target communities during restoration. In this study, we explored the effect of transplanting soil and plant litter on plant and soil biota communities in an already afforested limestone quarry. Soil or plant litter from a mature deciduous forest...

Question Which species are successful colonisers of disturbed sites; species adapted to seed dispersal, resistance to abiotic stress, or competition ability? Are successful adaptations for colonisation shared by phylogenetically related species? Location Czech Republic, Central Europe. Methods We used two indices of plant species’ colonisation ab...

Bioindication systems based on the occurrence of plant species are widely used in vegetation science, palaeoecology, community ecology, geographical modelling and global change biology. Although the existing systems are mostly regional, the development of large-scale vegetation databases calls for the establishment of a pan-European indication syst...

Questions (1) How much do abiotic site factors and land‐cover categories influence the course of succession across successional series at a country scale? (2) Are there any differences in the abiotic site factors and land‐cover categories which are responsible for driving primary and secondary seres? (3) Which of the factors influence species richn...

Aims Vegetation‐plot sampling usually involves estimating species cover. When plots are classified to vegetation types, covers are often transformed to decrease the effect of dominant species. However, it remains unclear which transformation is optimal. We suggest that for vegetation classification, optimal is such transformation as contributes to...

Aims To create a comprehensive, consistent and unequivocal phytosociological classification of European marsh vegetation of the class Phragmito‐Magnocaricetea . Location Europe. Methods We applied the Cocktail method to a European data set of 249,800 vegetation plots. We identified the main purposes and attributes on which to base the classificat...

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....

The Late Pleistocene landscape in northern Eurasia and North America was inhabited by a specific megafaunal complex, which largely disappeared during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. Vegetation changes are considered as one of the factors responsible for these extinctions, but the structure and composition of the Pleistocene vegetation are stil...

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...

Quick identification of vegetation types in the field, based on species composition but not requiring time‐consuming plot sampling, is often needed for vegetation mapping, conservation assessment, teaching and other applications of vegetation classification. Here we propose a new method which identifies the probability of belonging to the units of...

Aim Climate is an important factor controlling plant distributions. However, it is not yet fully understood how climate interacts with human impacts or whether the effects of these factors differ between native and alien species. Facing ongoing climate change and urbanization, we explore the effects of climate on plant species richness and composit...

Aims Expert systems are increasingly popular tools for supervised classification of large datasets of vegetation‐plot records, but their classification accuracy depends on the selection of proper species and species groups that can effectively discriminate vegetation types. Here, we present a new semi‐automatic machine‐learning method called GRIMP...

The species richness–productivity relationship is one of the most debated patterns in ecology. Species coexistence theory suggests that it could be tightly linked to the type of nutrient limitation (no limitation, single‐nutrient limitation, colimitation by several nutrients). Yet, the effects of nutrient limitation on the species richness–producti...

The dry grasslands of the Central and Eastern Balkan Peninsula are highly diverse, but were lacking a high-rank phytosociological classification that is consistent across countries. We thus collated the Balkan Dry Grassland Database (BDGD; GIVD: EU-00-013) to fill this gap. We developed a hierarchical classification system for classes, orders and a...

A new dataset of ecological indicator values for species, subspecies and some varieties, hybrids and infrageneric species groups has been compiled for the vascular flora of the Czech Republic. Indicator values for light, temperature, moisture, (soil) reaction, nutrient availability and salinity were assigned to 2275 species and 801 other taxa, usin...

Aims Although many phytosociological studies have provided detailed local and regional descriptions of coastal dune vegetation, a unified classification of this vegetation in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin has been missing. Our aim is to produce a formalized classification of this vegetation and to identify the main factors driving its plant sp...

A central hypothesis of ecology states that regional diversity influences local diversity through species-pool effects. Species pools are supposedly shaped by large-scale factors and then filtered into ecological communities, but understanding these processes requires the analysis of large datasets across several regions. Here, we use a framework o...

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 Pondoland Scarp Forests (limited to the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape Province and southwestern seaboards of KwaZulu-Natal) are probably the most valuable forest type of South Africa due to the relict character of the current extent and high plant endemism. This chapter present the first classification of the forest communities of this canyon-...

This chapter describes standard protocol for vegetation surveys in forests, focused on the identification and description of forest plant communities (and their groupings). The protocol uses spatial data on the distribution of forests as basis for the selection of targeted sampling sites, the methodology of the field vegetation (and environment) sa...

This chapter brings the first comprehensive classification of the Eastern Scarp Forest. These are very fragmented and relictual forests, structurally complex, rich in tropical elements as well as species of conservation and horticultural value. Nearly all play an important cultural role for the local communities and deserve formal protection. Sixte...

In this chapter, we test whether the structural completeness (data stratified into structural layers—tree, shrub, herbaceous, epiphytes) in species-rich subtropical forests impacts on classification outcome. We manipulated a well-structured (multi-layered) data set by successive removing structural layers. We have found that the herbaceous layer (E...

Albany Coastal Forests are subtropical vegetation type occurring in the western part of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Alexandria Forest is the largest complex of forest patches of this type. Smaller, numerous patches of the Albany forests occur in deeply incised valleys of the rivers in the Albany region. These forests are in contact w...

Aim: To describe the classification approach and protocols that were used in the project Vegetation of the Czech Republic and relate them to the comparative framework for broad-scale plot-based vegetation classification proposed by De Cáceres et al. (2015). This description should facilitate comparison of this national vegetation classification wit...

The colonization of newly created sites by plants is determined by the characteristics of the species and their frequency in the surrounding landscape (mass effect).We used species frequencies from the Database of Successional Series of various disturbed sites across the Czech Republic (DaSS, 2817 phytosociological relevés, 1013 species of vascular...

Dominance of native or alien competitive plants causes competitive exclusion of subordinate species and represents a major mechanism reducing biodiversity following land‐use changes. The successful competitive strategies may, however, be interfered with by parasitic plants, which withdraw resources from other plants' vasculature. Parasitism may str...

This projects aims at parameterising the grassland units of the revised EUNIS habitat classification across Europe. Using the comprehensive plot dataset from the European Vegetation Archive (EVA), all grassland habitats (habitat group E) of Europe (including the coastal grey dunes, habitat subgroup B1.4) are formally defined with a unanimous floris...

Aims: Syntaxonomic classification is widely used for vegetation survey in Europe. The long history of its use has produced many concepts and names of vegetation units that need to be revised and integrated into a single classification system. Here we (1) present a new, global hierarchical syntaxonomic systems of alliances, orders, classes of the Br...

The very short lifespan of some therophytes and geophytes growing in Central European deciduous forests and dry grasslands may be a source of inconsistencies in vegetation data analyses. Based on data provided by the Czech National Phytosociological Database (CNPD) we identified frequently occurring vernal species, using species life-form strategie...

Background: Ecological indicator values (EIVs) have a long tradition in vegetation ecological research in Europe. EIVs characterise the ecological optimum of species along major environmental gradients using ordinal scales. Calculating mean indicator values per plot is an effective way of bioindication. Following first systems in Russia and Central...

Questions: What are the major floristic and ecological gradients of the Balkan dry grassland vegetation and how could they best be reflected in a formal phytosociological classification? Location: Bulgaria, Northern Greece, Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia. Methods: We compiled a comprehensive vegetation-plot database of dry grasslands from...

Questions (1) Do 17 seres studied proceed towards corresponding potential natural vegetation; (2) what are the similarities between seral and potential natural vegetation, and is it possible to estimate how long it takes to reach potential natural vegetation; and (3) do primary and secondary seres differ? Location Extracted peatlands, corridors of...