Ondřej Hájek

• Masaryk University

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...

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...

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....

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....

Site-scale species richness (alpha diversity) patterns are well described for many present-day ecosystems, but they are difficult to reconstruct from the fossil record. Very little is thus known about these patterns in Pleistocene full-glacial landscapes and their changes following Holocene climatic amelioration. However, present-day central Asian...

The current version of the check-list follows Horsák et al. (2013) with up-to-date modifications supplemented with a reference. Distribution map for each species was constructed based on published data and our knowledge based on unpublished records. So far 251 species of molluscs, including 223 species of gastropods (51 aquatic and 172 terrestrial)...

Some regions and habitats harbour high numbers of plant species at a fine scale. A remarkable example is the grasslands of the White Carpathian Mountains (Czech Republic), which hold world records in local species richness, however the causes are still poorly understood. To explore the landscape context of this phenomenon and its relationships to d...

Aim To determine relative effects of habitat type, climate and spatial pattern on species richness and composition of native and alien plant assemblages in central European cities. Location Central Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands. Methods The diversity of native and alien flora was analysed in 32 cities. In each city, plant species were recorde...

Aim It is generally believed that communities of small organisms, or those with small propagules, are structured mainly by local niche‐based processes, and less by dispersal limitation. Conversely, weaker environmental and stronger spatial structure, indicating dispersal limitation, are expected to occur more frequently in communities of large orga...

Aim Urbanization is associated with strong changes in biodiversity, but the diversity of plant and animal assemblages varies among urban habitats. We studied effects of urban habitats on the diversity of vascular plants and land snails in 32 large cities. Location Central Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands. Methods The species composition of all v...

The flora of the White Carpathians, a mountain range in the south-east of the Czech Republic, is documented by about 485,000 records of vascular plant occurrences collected since the mid-19th century. A total of 1299 species recorded in 93 grid cells of 2.8 × 3.1 km were used for an analysis of spatial patterns of floristic diversity in the White C...

Aim: Vegetation plots collected since the early 20th century and stored in large vegetation databases are an important source of ecological information. These databases are used for analyses of vegetation diversity and estimation of vegetation parameters, however such analyses can be biased due to preferential sampling of the original data. In cont...

Terrestrial snail faunas were studied at 273 sites in three large Czech cities (Prague, Pilsen and Hradec Králové). The aim was to explore the effect of habitat degradation on land snail diversity in urban environments. Of the 81 species recorded, 12 were considered synanthropic and 29 anthropophobic. We assessed the power of habitat degradation an...

Question: What is the variation in species composition of Central European semi-dry grasslands? Can we apply a training-and-test validation approach for identifying phytosociological associations which are floristically well defined in a broad geographic comparison; can we separate them from earlier described associations with only a local validity...

Man-made habitats in central Europe can be broadly divided into arable land with weed vegetation, and settlements and their surroundings, harbouring ruderal vegetation. The former is a predictable environment with frequent, regular and large-scale disturbances, while the latter is an unpredictable environment with irregular disturbances of varying...

In the tradition of European phytosociology, delimitations of vegetation units such as associations are mostly based on data from small areas where more detailed vegetation sampling has been carried out. Such locally delimited vegetation units are often accepted in large-scale synthetic classifications, e.g. national vegetation monographs, and tent...

Question The heterogeneous origin of the data in large phytosociological databases may seriously influence the results of their analysis. Therefore we propose some strategies for stratified resampling of such databases, which may improve the representativeness of the data. We also explore the effects of different resampling options on vegetation cl...