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Publications
Publications (37)
Ungulate populations are increasing across Europe with important implications for forest plant communities. Concurrently, atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition continues to eutrophicate forests, threatening many rare, often more nutrient-efficient, plant species. These pressures may critically interact to shape biodiversity as in grassland and tundra...
Mitigating the effects of global change on biodiversity requires its understanding in the past. The main proxy of plant diversity, fossil pollen record, has a complex relationship to surrounding vegetation and unknown spatial scale. We explored both using modern pollen spectra in species-rich and species-poor regions in temperate Central Europe. We...
Ungulate herbivore populations are increasing across Europe with important implications for forest plant communities. Concurrently, atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition continues to eutrophy forests, threatening many rare plant species. These pressures may critically interact to shape biodiversity as in grassland and tundra systems, yet any potentia...
Species turnover is ubiquitous. However, it remains unknown whether certain types of species are consistently gained or lost across different habitats. Here, we analysed the trajectories of 1827 plant species over time intervals of up to 78years at 141sites across mountain summits, forests, and lowland grasslands in Europe. We found, albeit with...
We studied macrophyte and diatom assemblages and a range of environmental factors in the large hypertrophic Dehtář fishpond (Southern Bohemia, Czech Republic) over the course of several growing seasons. The spatial diversity of the environment was considered when collecting diatoms and water samples in three distinct parts of the fishpond, where au...
Motivation
Detailed knowledge on the climatic tolerances of species is crucial to understand, quantify and predict the impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, quantitative data are limited; often, only expert‐based qualitative estimates are available. With the ClimPlant database, we capitalize on the link between...
Aim
Pollen has been used before to reconstruct Holocene plant diversity changes in broadly delimited regions such as continents and countries. In this study we ask whether finer‐scale differences in plant diversity, which are of interest to biogeographers and ecologists, are also detectable in the fossil pollen record coming from a single, biogeogr...
The direction and magnitude of long-term changes in local plant species richness are highly variable among studies, while species turnover is ubiquitous. However, it is unknown whether the nature of species turnover is idiosyncratic or whether certain types of species are consistently gained or lost across different habitats. To address this questi...
Biological communities accumulate a climatic (thermal) debt when their response to warming does not keep up with the warming rate itself. Forest understory plant communities appear to respond particularly slowly to warming, and thus climatic debts are commonly observed in forest under-story plant communities (1, 2). In line with conventional approa...
Canopy structure and composition are important determinants of spatial and temporal variation in forest microcli-mate (1, 2). Accordingly, we inferred the microclimate from macroclimate data and the modulating effect of the canopy layer [figure 1B in Zellweger et al. (3)]. Bertrand et al. (4) used our data to separately analyze the effects of macro...
Question: An ancient woodland site with a long history of coppicing and heavy grazing was protected from domesticated stock in 1955. Results of a vegetation‐monitoring experiment were subsequently published in 1983. This study followed up the original research to investigate whether observed trends were as predicted. These included a shift in tree...
Aims
Reconstruction of the Holocene diversity changes in a biogeographically complex region. Description of major diversity patterns, testing their predictors, and their interpretation in the palaeoecological and biogeographical context. Testing the assumption that pollen record is informative with respect to plant diversity in our study area.
Met...
Pollen is an abundant fossil and the most common proxy for plant diversity during the Holocene. Based on datasets in open, forest, and mixed habitats, we used the spatial distribution of floristic diversity to estimate the source area of pollen diversity and identify factors influencing the significance of this relationship.
Our study areas are Boh...
Biodiversity time series reveal global losses and accelerated redistributions of species, but no net loss in local species richness. To better understand how these patterns are linked, we quantify how individual species trajectories scale up to diversity changes using data from 68 vegetation resurvey studies of seminatural forests in Europe. Herb-l...
Local factors restrain forest warming
Microclimates are key to understanding how organisms and ecosystems respond to macroclimate change, yet they are frequently neglected when studying biotic responses to global change. Zellweger et al. provide a long-term, continental-scale assessment of the effects of micro- and macroclimate on the community com...
Plant.id is a plant identification service powered by deep convolutional network model. We created plant.id to give access to the cutting edge machine learning technology accessible through the web app for people for free and through API for commercial use.
Proper evaluation of performance and selection of results can be tricky because one number...
Recent studies imply that response patterns of species and phylogenetic diversity may differ. Here, we addressed the following questions: What are the most important drivers and is there a difference in the responses to environmental drivers between species and phylogenetic diversity? If so, which ecological mechanisms determine these patterns and...
Aim
Revisits of non‐permanent, relocatable plots first surveyed several decades ago offer a direct way to observe vegetation change and form a unique and increasingly used source of information for global change research. Despite the important insights that can be obtained from resurveying these quasi‐permanent vegetation plots, their use is prone...
Understorey communities can dominate forest plant diversity and strongly affect forest ecosystem structure and function. Understoreys often respond sensitively but inconsistently to drivers of ecological change, including nitrogen (N) deposition. Nitrogen deposition effects, reflected in the concept of critical loads, vary greatly not only among sp...
Understorey plant communities play a key role in the functioning of forest ecosystems. Under favourable environmental conditions, competitive understorey species may develop high abundances and influence important ecosystem processes such as tree regeneration. It is thus important for managers to be able to predict accurately the abundance response...
Question: European temperate forests have been managed for millennia, and this management has left a long-lasting legacy in soil chemistry and plant species composition and diversity. One of the most common practices was the raking of leaf litter, which was used as bedding for farm animals. We asked, what is the legacy of historical litter raking f...
The contemporary state of functional traits and species richness in plant communities depends on legacy effects of past disturbances. Whether temporal responses of community properties to current environmental changes are altered by such legacies is, however, unknown. We expect global environmental changes to interact with land-use legacies given d...
Transformation of coppices to high forests has caused fundamental changes in site conditions and a decline of many species across Central Europe. Nevertheless, some formerly coppiced forests still harbour a number of the declining species and have become biodiversity hotspots in the changing landscape. We focused on the best-preserved remnant of fo...
More and more ecologists have started to resurvey communities sampled in earlier decades to determine long-term shifts in community composition and infer the likely drivers of the ecological changes observed. However, to assess the relative importance of and interactions among multiple drivers, joint analyses of resurvey data from many regions span...
Epiphytic diatom communities from the Dehtář fishpond (Czech Republic) were studied in terms of species composition, diversity and functional traits. We asked whether variability among samples is determined by sampled substrate (macrophyte species) or location (sampling site). Twenty-one samples of eleven species of vas-cular plants (predominantly...
Questions:
Did high densities of wild ungulates cause a decline in plant species richness in a temperate oakwood? How did species composition change after nearly five decades? Did ungulates facilitate the spread of ruderal species and supress endangered species? Did dispersal strategies play a role in these processes?
Location:
Krumlov Wood, SE...
Global biodiversity is affected by numerous environmental drivers. Yet, the extent to which global environmental changes contribute to changes in local diversity is poorly understood. We investigated biodiversity changes in a meta-analysis of 39 resurvey studies in European temperate forests (3988 vegetation records in total, 17-75 years between th...
QuestionsWhat is the impact of simulated historical tree litter removal on understorey plants and soil properties in a temperate deciduous forest? What is the role of seasonal timing of tree litter removal on understorey plants?LocationPodyjí National Park, Czech Republic.Methods
We conducted an experiment in a randomized complete block design of 4...
We did a pilot study of a novel internet-based system and its potential application in education. The target are university students whose study field is largely based on encyclopedical knowledge. We attempted to answer a question, whether the proposed system can be a sustainable educational tool benefiting all involved subjects, i.e. students, sen...
Projects
Projects (4)
The aim of the ROTATE Action is to support the biodiversity of organisms associated with traditional forms of forest management (coppicing, pollarding, leaf litter removal) in Central and Northern Europe. Interdisciplinary approach will ensure overcoming of existing barriers that prevent the introduction of knowledge into practice. The outputs will be processed in the form of scientific publications, workshops and conferences and in the form of an approved methodology that will reflect the needs of application guarantors. A wider transfer into practice and sustainability beyond the project is expected, which will be guaranteed by several application guarantors. The outputs will include monitoring of selected groups of organisms and ensuring long-term care of selected sites.
Plant identification by machine learning. Train on proprietary data from FlowerChecker, used deep learning techniques. The goal is to offer this as an API as B2B.
The main aim of this project is to test the general hypothesis that management history in the past 200 years has been a formative driving factor of temperate forest biodiversity at species and functional levels.
Management effects are conceptually divided into two aspects: a) immediate influence as pulses – management events at time points in the history of studied forest sites, b) long-lasting legacy of particular management events.
Historical management is considered in relation to other anthropogenic factors, such as changes in atmospheric deposition and climate change to assess the relative contribution of each of the major drivers.
