Michal Hájek

Michal Hájek
Masaryk University | MUNI · Department of Botany and Zoology

About

331
Publications
138,842
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
11,170
Citations
Introduction

Publications

Publications (331)
Article
Full-text available
We describe the vegetation of small-sized non-forest wetlands in the forests of Bystrá dolina, located in the western part of the Pilsko massif in the Orava region of northern Slovakia. The sites are situated between 1126 and 1293 meters a. s. l. In the vicinity of active springs or streams, a spring habitat of national interest has been inhabited...
Preprint
Full-text available
15 The historical development of the vegetation of semi-dry grasslands in Central Europe is 16 not satisfactorily understood. Long-term continuity of open vegetation or, conversely, 17 deep-past forest phases are considered possible sources of current extreme species 18 diversity of these ecosystems. We aimed to reveal trajectory of paleovegetation...
Article
Aim The influence of species phylogenetic relatedness on the formation of insular assemblages remains understudied in functional island biogeography, especially for terrestrial habitat islands (i.e. distinct habitat patches embedded in a matrix that differ in the prevailing environmental conditions). Here, we tested three eco‐evolutionary hypothese...
Article
Full-text available
According to the International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature, a younger name of a syntaxon may be conserved against its older name to improve the stability of the nomenclature and avoid misunderstandings in scientific communication. Here, we propose conserving the name Philonotidion seriatae Hinterlang 1992 for arctic-alpine, bryophyte-dom...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding large‐scale drivers of biodiversity in palustrine wetlands is challenging due to the combined effects of macroclimate and local edaphic conditions. In boreal and temperate fen ecosystems, the influence of macroclimate on biodiversity is modulated by hydrological settings across habitats, making it difficult to assess their vulnerabili...
Article
Full-text available
The class Montio-Cardaminetea includes vegetation of springs with constant water flow. These habitats, which function as islands for highly specialized and sensitive biota, are endangered by ongoing landscape and climatic changes. Although a harmonized classification into vegetation units is necessary for effective habitat conservation, there is cu...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
Aims and background Groundwater-dependent minerotrophic fens are globally threatened biodiversity hotspots. The supply of groundwater keeps their soil thermally stable and mitigates climatic extremes by thermal buffering. This stability has been shown to influence species composition variation at the between-site scale but has not been studied at...
Article
Sedge-moss fens are declining and are being replaced by more productive ecosystems in agricultural landscapes as a result of changes in the way how the landscape is used by society. We aim to identify commonalities between changes in vegetation species composition and changes in properties of groundwater on fens. Most similar resurvey studies use n...
Article
Full-text available
An undesired succession of rich fens leads to the formation of dense Sphagnum carpets that outcompete brown mosses and some vascular plants, resulting in biodiversity loss in fen habitats of high conservation importance. Small‐scale Sphagnum removal is a rarely implemented conservational measure, whose success may depend on soil alkalinity and fert...
Article
Testate amoebae play an important role in biomonitoring and the understanding of peatland (palaeo)ecology. However, their application has been mainly limited to Sphagnum-dominated peatlands, especially ombrotrophic bogs. To facilitate wider use of these microorganisms, we explored their ecology along a gradient from mineral-poor acidic bogs to mine...
Article
While the importance of conservation mowing for mesic grasslands is generally accepted, its use for fens and fen grasslands interspersed within agricultural land is still controversial. Although fens may persist naturally, ongoing environmental changes increase productivity and accelerate succession. These processes can be mitigated through conserv...
Poster
Full-text available
This poster presents the results of our study „Ecology of testate amoebae along an environmental gradient from bogs to calcareous fens in East-Central Europe: development of transfer functions for palaeoenvironmental reconstructions“ published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology – issue September 2022. DOI of the paper is 10.1016/j...
Article
Aim: Trait-based approaches are being used increasingly in island biogeography, providing key insights into the eco-evolutionary dynamics of insular systems. However, the determinants of persistence of plant species after they have arrived and established on an island remain largely unexplored. Here, we used three edaphic island systems (i.e., habi...
Article
Aims Classification of European bog vegetation ( Oxycocco‐Sphagnetea class); identification of diagnostic species for the class and vegetation subgroups (orders and alliances); development of an expert system for automatic classification of vegetation plots; and production of distribution maps of the Oxycocco‐Sphagnetea class and its alliances. Lo...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
We report new maxima of vascular plant species richness ever recorded in 10-m2 plots (115 and 110 species in two adjacent plots). Both come from a steppe meadow at a well-known site Valea Lui Craiu, located in the Fânaţele Clujului grassland complex close to the city of Cluj in Transylvania, Romania, where maximum values have been observed before....
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Aim: Forest-steppe complexes in the peri-Carpathian region harbour specific vegetation dominated by tall herbs. Our aim was to provide new phytosociological data on this vegetation type from the Ukraine and adjacent parts of Romania, compare it with previously published data, discuss its position in broad ecological and biogeographical context and...
Article
Full-text available
The theory of island biogeography postulates that size and isolation are key drivers of biodiversity on islands. This theory has been applied not only to true (e.g. oceanic) islands but also to terrestrial island‐like systems (e.g. edaphic islands). Recently, a debate has opened as to whether terrestrial island‐like systems function like true islan...
Article
Full-text available
Questions: Species-area relationships (SARs) are fundamental for understanding biodiversity patterns and are generally well described by a power law with a constant exponent z. However, z-values sometimes vary across spatial scales. We asked whether there is a general scale dependence of z-values at fine spatial grains and which potential drivers i...
Article
Groundwater-dependent ecosystems represent globally rare edaphic islands of scattered distribution, often forming areas of regionally unique environmental conditions. A stable groundwater supply is a key parameter defining their ecological specificity, promoting also soil thermal buffering. Still, a limited number of studies dealt with the importan...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim Trait-based approaches are increasingly implemented in island biogeography, providing key insights into the eco-evolutionary dynamics of insular systems. However, what determines persistence of plant species once they have arrived and established in an island remains largely unexplored. Here, we examined links between non-acquisitive persistenc...
Article
Human activities have enormous impact on current biodiversity distribution across all spatial scales. Despite the numerous studies showing the difference between preserved and impaired sites, only little is known about the regional scale. Therefore, we selected four European regions differing in habitat conservation status (HCS) to explore if the v...
Article
Full-text available
Water resources and associated ecosystems are becoming highly endangered due to ongoing global environmental changes. Spatial ecological modelling is a promising toolbox for understanding the past, present and future distribution and diversity patterns in groundwater-dependent ecosystems, such as fens, springs, streams, reed beds or wet grasslands....
Article
The moss Drepanocladus lycopodioides, considered extinct in the Czech Republic, has been rediscovered. The population occurs in an abandoned sandstone quarry with a shallow water pool; the site known as Lom Rasová is located in the Bílé Karpaty Mts (the White Carpathians) in the south-eastern part of the Czech Republic. The species has not been rec...
Article
Full-text available
Aims To develop the first comprehensive syntaxonomic classification for patchy montane mire and spring vegetation across the Irano‐Turanian phytogeographical region in Iran, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and to explore the effects of the main environmental and geographic gradients on their distribution. Location Alborz Mountain range (Iran), Pamir‐Ala...
Article
Full-text available
Fungi are a highly diverse group of organisms and play a significant role in decomposition and carbon cycling in boreal ecosystems. To determine how fungal communities are structured in peat bogs and how to obtain representative samples for monitoring fungal community changes, we separately sampled and sequenced (ITS2, Illumina MiSeq) peat, mixed l...
Article
Full-text available
Calcareous and rich fens harbour the unique biodiversity of plants and invertebrates. They areextremely sensitive to landscape changes because oftheir island nature. In the Carpathians, theyare still well-preserved, but their number has substantially decreased. Knowledge about theirvariability and classification into vegetation units, a baseline fo...
Chapter
Springs are ecosystems influenced by the exposure of groundwater at the Earth's surface. Springs are abundant and have played important, highly interactive ecological, cultural, and socio-economic roles in arid, mesic, and subaqueous environments throughout human evolution and history. However, springs also are widely regarded as being highly threa...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Rich fens are known as biodiversity hot spots among peatlands encompassing many endangered bryophytes. In some European regions, specialised rich-fen bryophytes, including red-listed species, have been outcompeted by expansive Sphagnum species and competitively strong vascular plants. One of the main causes of the rapid succession was a cessation o...
Preprint
Full-text available
Water resources and associated ecosystems are becoming highly endangered due to ongoing global environmental changes. Spatial ecological modelling is a widely used tool for understanding the past, present and future distribution and diversity patterns in groundwater-dependent ecosystems, such as fens, springs, streams, reed beds or wet grasslands....
Article
The Western Carpathians have recently been examined by several palaeoecological studies. However, they are still a region that remains underexplored in terms of the Holocene history of mountain woodlands. We analysed an 8,000 years old peat sequence from the southern part of the Western Carpathians (the Bykovo site) for pollen, needles and stomata,...
Article
The extreme species richness of some temperate grasslands is a globally relevant yet understudied phenomenon. Until now, few records from thoroughly sampled, though not permanently fixed, vegetation plots were available. We therefore established a network of 40 permanent 4 × 4-m2 plots in species-rich grasslands of the White Carpathians (Czechia),...
Article
Full-text available
The relative importance of global versus local environmental factors for growth and thus carbon uptake of the bryophyte genus Sphagnum—the main peat‐former and ecosystem engineer in northern peatlands—remains unclear. We measured length growth and net primary production (NPP) of two abundant Sphagnum species across 99 Holarctic peatlands. We tested...
Article
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...
Article
Abstract: Mosses Meesia triquetra, Paludella squarrosa, Pseudocalliergon trifarium, and Scorpidium scorpioides represent umbrella species of pristine rich fens. They are considered to be endangered taxa and glacial relicts in temperate Europe. We analysed species composition of vegetation with the target species in the Alps, Central Europe, the Bal...
Article
Full-text available
Abstrakt: Červený seznam biotopů České republiky hodnotí riziko zániku pro 157 typů přirozených a polopřirozených biotopů vymezených ve druhém vydání Katalogu biotopů České republiky. Hodnocení bylo provedeno podle metodiky pro Červený seznam ekosystémů Mezinárodního svazu ochrany přírody (IUCN) v úpravě použité v Evropském červeném seznamu biotopů...
Article
Full-text available
Origin and dynamics of spruce woodlands in central Europe is an important topic due to the current disturbances triggered by bark beetle outbreaks and extreme climatic events. We focused on the Late Holocene development of spruce-dominated woodlands at their southern margin in the Western Carpathians. We analysed eight peat profiles along an altitu...
Article
The study of insular systems has a long history in ecology and biogeography. Island plants often differ remarkably from their noninsular counterparts, constituting excellent models for exploring eco-evolutionary processes. Trait-based approaches can help to answer important questions in island biogeography, yet plant trait patterns on islands remai...
Article
Western-Carpathian travertine fens developed on deep-circulation groundwater are highly localised and harbour unique communities that combine rare species of calcareous fens and salt marshes, with many species considered glacial or Early-Holocene relicts. Using a multi-proxy palaeoecological approach, we tested the assumption of naturalness and Hol...
Article
Question Filtering of vegetation plot records according to sampling size is an essential methodological step in vegetation studies. In fens, the variation of traditionally used plot sizes seems to limit continental‐scale syntheses following the Braun‐Blanquet approach. Which plot sizes harbour the analogous number of habitat specialists (i.e. diagn...
Article
Research on past abrupt climate change and linked biotic response is essential for understanding of the future development of biota under changing climatic conditions, which, in turn, is necessary for adequate progress in ecosystem management and nature conservation. The present study presents the first comprehensive reconstruction of local and reg...
Article
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....
Article
Full-text available
In this overview (introductory article to a special issue including 14 papers), we consider all main types of natural and artificial inland freshwater habitas (fwh). For each type, we identify the main biodiversity patterns and ecological features, human impacts on the system and environmental issues, and discuss ways to use this information to imp...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Aims: Western Podolia is one of several regions in the Eurasian forest-steppe zone where diverse steppe vegetation has been relatively well preserved. Our aims were to describe compositional turnover of steppe vegetation along different environmental gradients, to identify the patterns of species richness and evenness across complete compositional...
Article
Calcareous fens represent an endangered type of peatlands, acting as refugia for stress-tolerant species in the currently changing landscapes. The resurveys across many regions have reported their recent disappearance or deterioration despite both the extreme habitat conditions (carbonate richness, presence of calcareous tufa, nutrient limitation,...
Article
Full-text available
We report new maximum values of vascular plant species richness ever recorded at 10 m2 and 16 m2-plots. Both come from sites where world record species numbers were reported before but from different plot size or with indication of different management regime. Our results support the view that extreme species richness is a temporally stable feature...
Article
Question Fens have a well‐developed bryophyte layer covering most of the ground. Non‐sphagnaceous bryophytes, especially the group of so‐called brown mosses, prevail over sphagna under alkaline conditions. In sub‐alkaline conditions, rich fens allow the co‐occurrence of both these functional groups, but sphagna are competitively superior over non‐s...
Article
The proportion of taxa in a pollen spectrum may not correspond to their proportion in vegetation. Quantitative reconstruction models therefore consider pollen productivities or fall speeds. We argue that azonal presence of spruce, an otherwise zonal tree species, in wetlands may confound the pollen-inferred reconstructions of vegetation cover as we...
Article
Landslides are an important natural phenomenon of the flysch Outer Western Carpathians that diversify the local topography and provide valuable microrefugia in the geomorphologically uniform region. For the first time, we reconstructed the continuous history of Carpathian landslide wetland – the Kotelnice mire, which initiated at the Pleistocene-Ho...
Article
The Red List of Habitats of the Czech Republic assesses the risk of collapse for 157 types of natural and semi-natural habitats defined in the second edition of the Habitat Catalogue of the Czech Republic. The assessment followed the guidelines for the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems as used in the European Red List of Habitats project, using the crite...
Article
The south‐western White Carpathians (Czech Republic, Slovakia) are one of the few places in low‐elevation Central Europe where a diverse landscape, including extremely species rich meadows, scattered oak trees and mixed oak woodlands, has escaped modern transformation. We studied C14‐dated and taxonomically identified macroscopic soil charcoal reco...