Radim Hédl

• PhD
• Head of Department at Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Abandonment of traditional management is among the major causes of the loss of temperate forest biodiversity. While numerous studies highlight the positive impact of restoring traditional forest management on biodiversity, there is a notable gap in research focusing on the ecological mechanisms underlying the benefits to taxonomic, functional, and...

Understanding how the traits of lineages are related to diversification is key for elucidating the origin of variation in species richness. Here, we test whether traits are related to species richness among lineages of trees from all major biogeographical settings of the lowland wet tropics. We explore whether variation in mortality rate, breeding...

Drought stress can profoundly affect plant growth and physiological vitality, yet there is a notable scarcity of controlled drought experiments focused on herbaceous species of the forest understorey. In this study, we collected seeds from five forb and four graminoid species common in European temperate forests. Seeds were germinated under control...

Biological nitrogen fixation is a fundamental part of ecosystem functioning. Anthropogenic nitrogen deposition and climate change may, however, limit the competitive advantage of nitrogen-fixing plants, leading to reduced relative diversity of nitrogen-fixing plants. Yet, assessments of changes of nitrogen-fixing plant long-term community diversity...

Climate change is commonly assumed to induce species’ range shifts toward the poles. Yet, other environmental changes may affect the geographical distribution of species in unexpected ways. Here, we quantify multidecadal shifts in the distribution of European forest plants and link these shifts to key drivers of forest biodiversity change: climate...

• Drought stress can profoundly affect plant growth and physiological vitality, yet there is a notable scarcity of controlled drought experiments focused on herbaceous species of the forest understory. • In this study, we collected seeds from five forb and four graminoid species growing in the temperate forest understory of the Czech Republic. Thes...

Grasslands above the timberline in European high mountains, such as the Alps, have been used as summer pasture for millennia, creating diverse ecosystems of high conservation value. However, the historical ecology of natural grasslands in middle mountains is much less known. We combined archival and palaeoecological sources to understand the manage...

Wild pollinators are crucial for ecosystem functioning and human food production and often rely on floral resources provided by different (semi‐) natural ecosystems for survival. Yet, the role of European forests, and especially the European forest herb layer, as a potential provider of floral resources for pollinators has scarcely been quantified....

Biodiversity world‐wide has been under increasing anthropogenic pressure in the past century. The long‐term response of biotic communities has been tackled primarily by focusing on species richness, community composition and functionality. Equally important are shifts between entire communities and habitat types, which remain an unexplored level of...

Publikace zaměřená na ochranu lesní biodiverzity přibližuje, jak se historicky proměnila lesní stanoviště v evropských podmínkách a jakým způsobem to ovlivnilo organismy, které lesy, případně stromy, potřebují ke svému životu. Kniha obsahuje popis tradičních praktik, ale i stručné návody pro ekologickou obnovu stanovišť.

Global change has accelerated local species extinctions and colonizations, often resulting in losses and gains of evolutionary lineages with unique features. Do these losses and gains occur randomly across the phylogeny? We quantified: temporal changes in plant phylogenetic diversity (PD); and the phylogenetic relatedness (PR) of lost and gained sp...

Plant communities are being exposed to changing environmental conditions all around the globe, leading to alterations in plant diversity, community composition, and ecosystem functioning. For herbaceous understorey communities in temperate forests, responses to global change are postulated to be complex, due to the presence of a tree layer that mod...

Coppicing is a form of forest management in European broadleaved forests. While it is still practised in south-eastern Europe, in central and western Europe it was almost completely replaced by high forest management. Currently, there are increasing efforts to reintroduce coppice management into former coppice woods. However, little comprehensive k...

Most European forests are used for timber production. Given the limited extent of unmanaged (and especially primary) forests, it is essential to include commercial forests in the conservation of forest biodiversity. In order to develop ecologically sustainable forest management practices, it is important to understand the management impacts on fore...

A mosaic of patches in various successional stages is key to maintaining high biodiversity in open temperate woodlands. The abandonment of traditional management, such as once widespread coppicing, has caused biodiversity loss and a shift to ecologically homogeneous communities. Invertebrates are one of the taxonomic groups that suffered the most f...

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...

Coppicing was a widespread form of forest management in European broadleaved forests. While it is still practised in south-eastern Europe, in central and western Europe it was almost completely replaced by high forest management. Currently there are increasing efforts to reintroduce coppice management into former coppice woods. However, little comp...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of selective logging on species richness, composition, and conservation value of epigeic spider community. We studied an initial stage of abandoned coppice restoration in the Děvín National Nature Reserve (Czech Republic). We sampled experimental plots in forest stands with three canopy thinning i...

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 78years at 141sites across mountain summits, forests, and lowland grasslands in Europe. We found, albeit with...

Woody species' requirements and environmental sensitivity change from seedlings to adults, a process referred to as ontogenetic shift. Such shifts can be increased by climate change. To assess the changes in the difference of temperature experienced by seedlings and adults in the context of climate change, it is essential to have reliable climatic...

Tropical forests are the most diverse and productive ecosystems on Earth. While better understanding of these forests is critical for our collective future, until quite recently efforts to measure and monitor them have been largely disconnected. Networking is essential to discover the answers to questions that transcend borders and the horizons of...

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...

Lowland forests of Central Europe had been managed by diverse traditional practices for millennia. Such management helped to maintain heterogeneous habitat conditions suitable for a wide variety of arthropod species. Modern approaches to conservation, however, with their strategies of nonintervention, unintentionally caused an overall habitat homog...

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...

Questions Coppice woods were once widespread in Europe. It is usually assumed that underwood tree taxon composition was not directly influenced by people, whereas especially Quercus was promoted among standard trees. However, no work has quantitatively tested these assumptions. Our main question was whether there were any patterns in our data to su...

Questions Light availability at the forest floor affects many forest ecosystem processes, and is often quantified indirectly through easy‐to‐measure stand characteristics. We investigated how three such characteristics, basal area, canopy cover and canopy closure, were related to each other in structurally complex mixed forests. We also asked how w...

Questions Long‐term legacies of historical human activities in temperate forests are increasingly recognised as an important driver of vegetation diversity and composition. To uncover centuries old legacies, novel approaches are, however, needed. Here, we combine anthracology of historical charcoal kilns and long‐term vegetation resurveys. We asked...

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...

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...

The sensitivity of tropical forest carbon to climate is a key uncertainty in predicting global climate change. Although short-term drying and warming are known to affect forests, it is unknown if such effects translate into long-term responses. Here, we analyze 590 permanent plots measured across the tropics to derive the equilibrium climate contro...

The sensitivity of tropical forest carbon to climate is a key uncertainty in predicting global climate change. Although short-term drying and warming are known to affect forests, it is unknown if such effects translate into long-term responses. Here, we analyze 590 permanent plots measured across the tropics to derive the equilibrium climate contro...

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...

Aims The dynamics of plant communities varies across temporal scales. A correct understanding of temporal patterns is crucial for interpretation of monitoring outputs. Focusing on the understory community of an ancient coppice at three temporal scales, our aims were to: 1) assess the link between year‐to‐year variations and a decadal successional c...

A central challenge of today's ecological research is predicting how ecosystems will develop under future global change. Accurate predictions are complicated by (a) simultaneous effects of different drivers, such as climate change, nitrogen deposition and management changes; and (b) legacy effects from previous land use. We tested whether herb laye...

The understorey in temperate forests can play an important functional role, depending on its biomass and functional characteristics. While it is known that local soil and stand characteristics largely determine the biomass of the understorey, less is known about the role of global change. Global change can directly affect understorey biomass, but a...

Lowland Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) forests cover extensive areas in Central Europe. Most of them are considered to be the results of relatively recent plantation-oriented forest management. We investigated the long-term history of lowland pine forests in the Záhorská Lowland region of aeolian sands in the northern margin of the Pannonian Basi...

• Functional traits respond to environmental drivers, hence evaluating trait‐environment relationships across spatial environmental gradients can help to understand how multiple drivers influence plant communities. Global‐change drivers such as changes in atmospheric nitrogen deposition occur worldwide, but affect community trait distributions at t...

Questions Recent studies have suggested that response patterns of species and phylogenetic diversity may differ. Here, we address 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 th...

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...

Topsoil conditions in temperate forests are influenced by several soil-forming factors, such as canopy composition (e.g. through litter quality), land-use history, atmospheric deposition, and the parent material. Many studies have evaluated the effects of single factors on physicochemical topsoil conditions, but few have assessed the simultaneous e...

Traditional woodland management created a dynamic mosaic of differently aged patches providing favorable conditions for a variety of arthropods. After the abandonment of historical ownership patterns providing traditional management and deliberate transformation to high forest after the World War II, large areas of forest became darker and more hom...

Forecasting the growth of tree species to future environmental changes requires a better understanding of its determinants. Tree growth is known to respond to global‐change drivers such as climate change or atmospheric deposition, as well as to local land‐use drivers such as forest management. Yet, large geographical‐scale studies examining interac...

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...

Abstract Aims: To identify the beech forest types in southwestern Poland and the main environmental gradients affecting their species composition. Study area: SW Poland. Methods: Vegetation types of beech forests were identified using the modified TWINSPAN algorithm, whereas unconstrained (DCA) and constrained (CCA) ordination methods were applied...

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 fo...

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...

The original version of this Article contained an error in the third sentence of the abstract and incorrectly read "Here, using long-term plot monitoring records of up to half a century, we find that intact forests in Borneo gained 0.43 Mg C ha-1 year-1 (95% CI 0.14-0.72, mean period 1988-2010) above-ground live biomass", rather than the correct "H...

Quantifying the relationship between tree diameter and height is a key component of efforts to estimate biomass and carbon stocks in tropical forests. Although substantial site‐to‐site variation in height–diameter allometries has been documented, the time consuming nature of measuring all tree heights in an inventory plot means that most studies do...

Less than half of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions remain in the atmosphere. While carbon balance models imply large carbon uptake in tropical forests, direct on-the-ground observations are still lacking in Southeast Asia. Here, using long-term plot monitoring records of up to half a century, we find that intact forests in Borneo gained 0.43...

Open oakwoods are ancient but currently vanishing plant communities of high conservation value. We studied the vegetation of Eurasian steppic oakwoods in the Czech Republic where they are at the westernmost outcrop of their potential distribution to understand ecosystem changes and their drivers in the period of modern environmental change. In 2012...

Temperate oak-dominated woodlands are plant communities characterized by relatively open canopy structure and often rich assemblages of light-demanding understory species. This vegetation prevailed in Central European lowlands during the early and middle Holocene. Where open woodlands persisted in later periods, several main factors might have prev...

Understanding the effects of coppicing on forest ecosystems is important for progress towards sustainable forest management. A newly established coppicing experiment in a secondary temperate deciduous forest in the SE Czech Republic provides a rather unique insight into succession driven by canopy thinning in a forest still lacking species typical...

Background: Resurveying historical vegetation plots has become more and more popular in recent years as it provides a unique opportunity to estimate vegetation and environmental changes over the past decades. Most historical plots, however, are not permanently marked and uncertainty in plot location, in addition to observer bias and seasonal bias,...

Coppice abandonment had negative consequences for the biodiversity of forest vegetation and several groups of invertebrates. Most coppicing restoration studies have focused only on a single trophic level despite the fact that ecosystems are characterized by interactions between trophic levels represented by various groups of organisms. To address t...

Environmental change can be viewed as the combined result of long-term processes and singular events. While long-term trends appear to be readily available for observation (in the form of temporal comparisons or space-for-time substitution), it is more difficult to gain information on singular events in the past, although these can be equally signi...

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...

Once you visit the extraordinary and unique ecosystems of Latin America, you would like to learn more about them. We learned a lot from our guides and lecturers during the IAVS excursions and plenary presentations and we are very grateful for this shared knowledge and experience. For many of us, these recent trips were the first time we visited the...

Questions Did high densities of wild ungulates cause a decline in plant species richness in a temperate oak wood? 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 Cze...

Most forest habitats, as defined and listed for their nature conservation importance in the Habitats Directive of the European Union and in the Bern Convention, result from centuries of human intervention. This paper explores the scope for, and the attitudes towards coppicing in Natura 2000 sites in some of the EU28 countries where coppice was hist...

Forests cover approximately one third of Central Europe. Based on a century of research tradition in phytosociology, potential vegetation mapping and palynology, oak (Quercus sp.) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica) are considered to be the natural dominants at low and middle altitudes, respectively. By contrast, currently many coniferous forests...

A new species of Thismia (Thismiaceae) from northwest Borneo is described and illustrated. Thismia brunneomitra was discovered in 2015 in lowland mixed dipterocarp forest in the Ulu Temburong National Park, Temburong district of Brunei Darussalam. The new species is characterized by brown to blackish flowers with twelve darker vertical stripes on t...

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...

The botanical guide was prepared for the 58th Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), held in Brno in the Czech Republic on 19–24 July 2015. After an introduction and a brief description of geography and biogeography of Moravia, 16 botanical sites discribed: 1 Žďár Hills (1a Dářko National Nature Reserve, Lo...

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...

The unimodal species richness-altitude distribution pattern seems to be universal. To investigate the validity of this phenomenon in homogeneous substrate and vegetation conditions, we sampled beech-dominated forests in five volcanic mountain ranges in the Western Carpathians. European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) formed monodominant closed-canopy st...

In the face of global change, the mapping of vegetation and its underlying site conditions has re-entered the focus of applied vegetation science. Thus, land managers, conservationists and scientists require a new generation of mapped and interpreted environmental information as a basis for scenario building, planning and decision making. Nowadays,...

Plant ecologists have long been interested in aspect-related contrasts of montane forests. Few studies have assessed correlation (linkage) among vegetation strata; fewer have included soil microbial communities. This study assessed contrasts in overstory, spring herbaceous, and soil microbial communities between northeast (NE) - and southwest (SW)...

Most range shift predictions focus on the dispersal phase of the colonization process. Because moving populations experience increasingly dissimilar nonclimatic environmental conditions as they track climate warming, it is also critical to test how individuals originating from contrasting thermal environments can establish in nonlocal sites. We ass...