Martin Mikoláš

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague | CULS · Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences

Balancing increasing demand for wood products while also maintaining forest biodiversity is a paramount challenge. Europe’s Biodiversity and Forest Strategies for 2030 attempt to address this challenge. Together, they call for strict protection of 10% of land area, including all primary and old growth forests, increasing use of ecological forestry,...

Natural disturbances play a crucial role in shaping forest structural dynamics, directly influencing stand struc­tural heterogeneity. In European forests, disturbances occur across varying scales, from small patches to entire landscapes, significantly affecting ecosystem dynamics. However, detailed information on historical disturbances and their s...

Addressing the scope of biodiversity loss is a societal issue. However, consensus regarding effective management practices to attenuate species extinction is lacking. An assessment of spatial variation in species assemblages (beta-diversity) provides a promising framework for informing forest landscape planning. Within the context of recent Europea...

With ongoing global warming, increasing water deficits promote physiological stress on forest ecosystems with negative impacts on tree growth, vitality, and survival. How individual tree species will react to increased drought stress is therefore a key research question to address for carbon accounting and the development of climate change mitigati...

Natural disturbances such as windthrows and bark beetle outbreaks are essential in the formation of natural forest ecosystem structures in Central Europe. Therefore, evaluating disturbances’ spatial and temporal extent and synchronicity is critical for understanding of forest dynamics. This study aimed to evaluate the long-term natural disturbance...

Tree-related microhabitats (TreMs) have been promoted as indicators of forest biodiversity and to guide conservation practices. Ensuring the provision of diverse TreMs in the long term is crucial for the survival of many forest-dwelling species. Yet, this task is challenging in the absence of information regarding TreM dynamics. We analysed the tem...

Primary forests are spatially diverse terrestrial ecosystems with unique characteristics, being naturally regenerative and heterogeneous, which supports the stability of their carbon storage through the accumulation of live and dead biomass. Yet, little is known about the interactions between biomass stocks, tree genus diversity and structure acros...

Basic ecological theory suggests that a tradeoff between competitiveness and stress tolerance dictates species range limits at regional extents. However, empirical support for this key theory remains deficient because the necessary spatial and temporal coverage and scalability of field observations has rarely been achieved. We harnessed an extensiv...

Carbon accounting in the land sector requires a reference level from which to calculate past losses of carbon and potential for gains using a stock-based target. Carbon carrying capacity represented by the carbon stock in primary forests is an ecologically-based reference level that allows estimation of the mitigation potential derived from protect...

We collected and analyzed structural and tree-ring data in Steneto and Boatin Natural Reserves and studied tree response after disturbances (ice and wind damages and fires) in North Dzhendem, Steneto and Sokolna reserves in the Central Balkan National Park, Bulgaria. Our aim was to contribute to the understanding of the structural variability of un...

Canopy accession strategies reveal much about tree life histories and forest stand dynamics. However, the protracted nature of ascending to the canopy makes direct observation challenging. We use a reconstructive approach based on an extensive tree ring database to study the variability of canopy accession patterns of dominant tree species (Abies a...

Forest biodiversity studies conducted across Europe use a multitude of forestry terms, often inconsistently. This hinders the comparability across studies and makes the assessment of the impacts of forest management on biodiversity highly context-dependent. Recent attempts to standardize forestry and stand description terminology mostly used a top-...

The European biodiversity and forest strategies rely on forest sustainable management (SFM) to conserve forest biodiversity. However, current sustainability assessments hardly account for direct biodiversity indicators. We focused on forest multi-taxon biodiversity to: i) gather and map the existing information; ii) identify knowledge and research...

Mountain spruce- and beech-dominated forests (SDPF and BDPF) are of major importance in temperate Europe. However, information on the differences between their historical disturbance regimes, structures, and biodiversity is still incomplete. To address this knowledge gap, we established 118 circular research plots across 18 primary forest stands. W...

Primary forests provide critical climate regulation functions through the capture and storage of carbon in biomass reservoirs. The capacity of primary forests to sustain biomass levels and the possible consequences of warming-induced increases in extreme disturbances are unresolved questions. We investigated the drivers of biomass accumulation in E...

An ongoing loss of Europe’s old-growth forests urgently calls for improving our understanding of native biodiversity response to habitat changes. Studies disentangling the effects of habitat quantity, quality, and continuity on species diversity are rare, however, understanding the differences between these effects is crucial for forest management...

Natural disturbances change forest habitat quality for many species. As the extent and intensity of natural disturbances may increase under climate change, it is unclear how this increase can affect habitat quality on different spatial scales. To support management tools and policies aiming to prevent habitat loss, we studied how habitat quality de...

Understanding temporal and spatial variations in historical disturbance regimes across intact, continuous, and altitudinally diverse primary forest landscapes is imperative to help forecast forest development and adapt forest management in an era of rapid environmental change. Because few complex primary forest landscapes remain in Europe, previous...

Assessing the impacts of natural disturbance on the functioning of complex forest systems are imperative in the context of global change. The unprecedented rate of contemporary species extirpations, coupled with widely held expectations that future disturbance intensity will increase with warming, highlights a need to better understand how natural...

Protecting structural features, such as tree‐related microhabitats (TreMs), is a cost‐effective tool crucial for biodiversity conservation applicable to large forested landscapes. Although the development of TreMs is influenced by tree diameter, species, and vitality, the relationships between tree age and TreM profile remain poorly understood. Usi...

Global change outcomes for forests will be strongly influenced by the demography of juvenile trees. We used data from an extensive network of forest inventory plots in Europe to quantify relationships between climate factors and growth rates in sapling trees for two ecologically dominant species, Norway spruce and European beech. We fitted nonlinea...

This manual has been produced through the European Commission (EC) service contract ‘Identification, Assessment, Sharing and Dissemination of Best Practices for Humane Management of Invasive Alien Species’ (07.027746/2019/812504/SER/ENV.D.2.). The aim of this project was to provide support for the management of vertebrate invasive alien species (ve...

In a world of accelerating changes in environmental conditions driving tree growth, tradeoffs between tree growth rate and longevity could curtail the abundance of large, old trees (LOTs), with potentially dire consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage. However, the influence of tree‐level tradeoffs on forest structure at landscape scales wi...

Development of primary spruce forests is driven by a series of disturbances, which also have an important influence on the understorey vegetation and its diversity. Early post-disturbance processes have been intensively studied, however, very little is known about the long-term effects of disturbances on the understorey. We quantified disturbance h...

Understanding the processes shaping the composition of assemblages at multiple spatial scales in response to disturbance events is crucial for preventing ongoing biodiversity loss and for improving current forest management policies aimed at mitigating climate change and enhancing forest resilience. Deadwood-inhabiting fungi represent an essential...

The mechanistic pathways connecting ocean-atmosphere variability and terrestrial productivity are well-established theoretically, but remain challenging to quantify empirically. Such quantification will greatly improve the assessment and prediction of changes in terrestrial carbon sequestration in response to dynamically induced climatic extremes....

The impact of forest management on biodiversity is difficult to scrutinize along gradients of management. A step towards analyzing the impact of forest management on biodiversity is comparisons between managed and primary forests. The standardized typology of tree-related microhabitats (TreMs) is a multi-taxon indicator used to quantify forest biod...

Forests are critical for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation: reducing emissions, increasing removals, and providing resilient ecosystems with stable long‐term carbon storage. However, evaluating the mitigation effectiveness of forests managed for conservation versus commodity production has been long debated. We assessed factor...

Heatwaves exert disproportionately strong and sometimes irreversible impacts on forest ecosystems. These impacts remain poorly understood at the tree and species level and across large spatial scales. Here, we investigate the effects of the record-breaking 2018 European heatwave on tree growth and tree water status using a collection of high-tempor...

Natural disturbances strongly influence forest structural dynamics, and subsequently stand structural heterogeneity, biomass, and forest functioning. The impact of disturbance legacies on current forest structure can greatly influence how we interpret drivers of forest dynamics. However, without clear insight into forest history, many studies defau...

Forests host most terrestrial biodiversity and their sustainable management is crucial to halt biodiversity loss. Although scientific evidence indicates that sustainable forest management (SFM) should be assessed by monitoring multi-taxon biodiversity, most current SFM criteria and indicators account only for trees or consider indirect biodiversity...

With accelerating environmental change, understanding forest disturbance impacts on trade-offs between biodiversity and carbon dynamics is of high socioeconomic importance. Most studies, however, have assessed immediate or short-term effects of disturbance, while long-term impacts remain poorly understood. Using a tree-ring-based approach, we analy...

Aim Natural disturbances influence forest structure, successional dynamics, and, consequently, the distribution of species through time and space. We quantified the long-term impacts of natural disturbances on lichen species richness and composition in primary mountain forests, with a particular focus on the occurrence of endangered species. Locat...

Primary forests, defined here as forests where the signs of human impacts, if any, are strongly blurred due to decades without forest management, are scarce in Europe and continue to disappear. Despite these losses, we know little about where these forests occur. Here, we present a comprehensive geodatabase and map of Europe’s known primary forests...

Aims We examined differences in lifespan among the dominant tree species (spruce (Picea abies (L.) H. Karst.), fir (Abies alba Mill.), beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), and maple (Acer pseudoplatanus L.)) across primary mountain forests of Europe. We ask how disturbance history, lifetime growth patterns, and environmental factors influence lifespan. Loc...

Wind is the leading disturbance agent in European forests, and the magnitude of wind impacts on forest mortality has increased over recent decades. However, the atmospheric triggers behind severe winds in Western Europe (large‐scale cyclones) differ from those in Southeastern Europe (small‐scale convective instability). This geographic difference i...

Adapting for competitiveness versus climatic stress tolerance constitutes a primary trade-off differentiating tree life-history strategies. This tradeoff likely influences where species’ range-limits occur, but such links are data-demanding to study and key mechanisms lack empirical support. Using an exceptionally rich dendroecological network, we...

The expected future intensification of forest disturbance as a consequence of ongoing anthropogenic climate change highlights the urgent need to more robustly quantify associated biotic responses. Saproxylic beetles are a diverse group of forest invertebrates representing a major component of biodiversity that is associated with the decomposition a...

Research Highlights: Past disturbances occurred naturally in primary forests in the Southern Carpathians. High-and moderate-severity disturbances shaped the present structure of these ecosystems, which regenerated successfully without forestry interventions. Background and Objectives: Windstorms and bark beetle outbreaks have recently affected larg...

Natural disturbances are key factors in the formation of forest ecosystem structure. Evaluation of the spatial and temporal extent of disturbance regimes is critical for understanding forest dynamics, forest structural hetero-geneity, and biodiversity habitats. Quantifying disturbance regimes is therefore imperative for appropriate management of fo...

Understanding the processes shaping the composition of assemblages in response to disturbance events is crucial for preventing ongoing biodiversity loss in forest ecosystems. However, studies of forest biodiversity responses to disturbance typically analyze immediate or short-term impacts only, while studies relating long-term disturbance history t...

Primary forests are critical for forest biodiversity and provide key ecosystem services. In Europe, these forests are particularly scarce and it is unclear whether they are sufficiently protected. Here we aim to: (a) understand whether extant primary forests are representative of the range of naturally occurring forest types, (b) identify forest ty...

Estimates of historical disturbance patterns are essential to guide forest management aimed at ensuring the sustainability of ecosystem functions and biodiversity. However, quantitative estimates of various disturbance characteristics required in management applications are rare in longer‐term historical studies. Thus, our objectives were to (1) qu...

A major concern in conservation biology today is the loss of genetic diversity in structured populations, which is often a consequence of habitat contraction and restricted gene flow over time. These dynamic biological processes require monitoring with temporal environmental and landscape genetic data. We compared the spatial genetic variation of a...

Accurate estimations of changes in the forest carbon (C) pools over time are essential for predicting the future forest C balance and its part in the global C cycle. While the overall understanding of global forest C dynamics has improved, some significant forest ecosystem processes have been largely overlooked, resulting in possible biases. As an...

Mortality, driven by both climate and disturbance legacies, is a key process shaping forest dynamics. Understanding the mortality patterns in primary forests in the absence of severe disturbances provides information on background natural dynamics of a given forest type under ongoing climate change. This can then be compared to mortality rates in s...

Key message Winter drought becomes a limiting factor of forest stand growth by the end of the twentieth century. Abstract Disturbances strongly influence the structure of natural forests. The frequency and severity of natural disturbances, as well as drought events, are expected to increase with climate change. Our study investigated if forests wi...

Given the global intensification of forest management and climate change, protecting and studying forests that develop free of direct human intervention-also known as primary forests-are becoming increasingly important. Yet, most countries still lack data regarding primary forest distribution. Previous studies have tested remote sensing approaches...

Climatic constraints on tree growth mediate an important link between terrestrial and atmospheric carbon pools. Tree rings provide valuable information on climate‐driven growth patterns, but existing data tend to be biased towards older trees on climatically extreme sites. Understanding climate change responses of biogeographic regions requires dat...

Context A comprehensive understanding of how rapidly changing environments affect species gene flow is critical for mitigating future biodiversity losses. While recent methodological developments in landscape ecology and genetics have greatly advanced our understanding of biodiversity conservation, they are rarely combined and applied in studies....

Disentangling the importance of developmental vs. environmental drivers of variation in forest biomass is key to predicting the future of forest carbon sequestration. At coarse scales, forest biomass is likely to vary along major climatic and physiographic gradients. Natural disturbance occurs along these broad biophysical gradients, and depending...

Amidst rapid global climate change and at a time when many adaptive policies and strategies have been implemented , reductionism in forest management decisions may have detrimental effects on forest biodiversity. Stăncioiu et al. (2018) made an important contribution by assessing forest connectivity based on tree species populations in Romania. The...

Restoring the structural characteristics of secondary old-growth forests that were previously managed is increasingly debated to help increase the area of more complex forests which provide a broader array of forest services and functions. The paucity of long-term data sets in Central Europe has limited our ability to understand the ongoing ecologi...

Aim The tinder fungus Fomes fomentarius is a pivotal wood decomposer in European beech Fagus sylvatica forests. The fungus, however, has regionally declined due to centuries of logging. To unravel biogeographical drivers of arthropod communities associated with this fungus, we investigated how space, climate and habitat amount structure alpha and b...

Accurately capturing medium- to low-frequency trends in tree-ring data is vital to assessing climatic response and developing robust reconstructions of past climate. Non-climatic disturbance can affect growth trends in tree-ring-width (RW) series and bias climate information obtained from such records. It is important to develop suitable strategies...

Tree-related microhabitats (TreMs) are important features for the conservation of biodiversity in forest ecosystems. Although other structural indicators of forest biodiversity have been extensively studied in recent decades, TreMs have often been overlooked, either due to the absence of a consensual definition or a lack of knowledge. Despite the i...

Large-scale forest dynamics are commonly assumed to be climate driven, but appropriately scaled disturbance histories are rarely available to assess how disturbance legacies alter subsequent disturbance rates and the climate sensitivity of disturbance. We compiled multiple tree ring-based disturbance histories from primary Picea abies forest fragme...

Aim Primary forests have high conservation value but are rare in Europe due to historic land use. Yet many primary forest patches remain unmapped, and it is unclear to what extent they are effectively protected. Our aim was to (1) compile the most comprehensive European‐scale map of currently known primary forests, (2) analyse the spatial determina...

Determining the drivers of shifting forest disturbance rates remains a pressing global change issue. Large-scale forest dynamics are commonly assumed to be climate driven, but appropriately scaled disturbance histories are rarely available to assess how disturbance legacies alter subsequent disturbance rates and the climate sensitivity of disturban...

The role of density dependence in shaping spatial patterns in tree distributions presumably changes throughout stand development. However, empirical investigations into developmental processes are often limited by a lack of long-term data on disturbance history, which further limits the ability to assess the role of spatial variation in site condit...

Mixed-severity disturbance regimes are prevalent in temperate forests worldwide, but key uncertainties remain regarding the variability of disturbance-mediated structural development pathways. This study investigates the influence of disturbance history on current structure in primary, unmanaged Norway spruce (Picea abies) forests throughout the Ca...