Veronika Kalusová

Masaryk University | MUNI · Department of Botany and Zoology

This article describes FloraVeg.EU, a new online database with open‐access information on European vegetation units (phytosociological syntaxa), vegetated habitats, and plant taxa. It consists of three modules. (1) The Vegetation module includes 149 phytosociological classes, 378 orders and 1305 alliances of an updated version of the EuroVegCheckli...

As a result of human activities, a considerable part of European vascular plants and their populations are non-native. Since the publication of previous studies summarizing the composition and structure of European alien flora, our knowledge has increased, and new alien plant inventories and updates to existing ones have been published. The aim of...

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...

Human-assisted introduction of alien plants is causing ecosystem transformations worldwide and is considered an important threat to biodiversity. We provide a European assessment of habitat levels of invasion in heathlands and scrub and identify successful alien plants and invasion trends across biogeographical regions. We analysed a geographically...

Aim Many plant species native to Europe have naturalized worldwide. We tested whether the phylogenetic structure of the species pools of European habitats is related to the proportion of species from each habitat that has naturalized outside Europe (habitat’s donor role) and whether the donated species are more phylogenetically related to each othe...

Questions The human‐related spread of alien plants has serious environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Therefore, it is important to know which habitats are most threatened by invasion and why. We studied a wide range of European grasslands to assess: (a) which alien species are the most successful invaders in grasslands; (b) how invasion levels d...

Kalusová, V., Chytrý, M., Padullés, J.C., Dawson, W., Essl, F., Fristoe, T., van Kleunen, M., Kreft, H., Mucina, L., Pergl, J., Pyšek, P., Weigelt, P., Winter, M. & Lososová, Z. 2020. Phylogenetic relatedness of alien plants depends on their donor habitats. 11th International Conference on Biological Invasions: The Human Role in Biological Invasion...

Aim Climate is an important factor controlling plant distributions. However, it is not yet fully understood how climate interacts with human impacts or whether the effects of these factors differ between native and alien species. Facing ongoing climate change and urbanization, we explore the effects of climate on plant species richness and composit...

Aim Urban floras are composed of species of different origin, both native and alien, and with various traits and niches. It is likely that these species will respond to the ongoing climate change in different ways, resulting in future species compositions with no analogues in current European cities. Our goal was to estimate potential shifts in pla...

Significance Understanding which species become successful aliens outside their native range is a fundamental question in ecology, as it informs efforts to mitigate ecological and economic losses from biological invasions. For alien plants of European origin, the association with human-disturbed environments is suggested as a key factor for their e...

Human made habitats are considered to be important hotspots of biodiversity of native as well as alien plant species. Due to high propagule pressure caused by human activities they serve as a source of introduction of alien plant species. We used the database of planted ornamental trees and shrubs for Brno, Czech Republic, to determine the signific...

Urbanized areas with high habitat heterogeneity and intense human impact form unique environment which is surprisingly rich in plant species. We explore the effect of the settlement size on plant species richness, composition and temperature requirements of plant communities. We studied three habitats with different disturbance regime in 45 Central...

Plants in cities must cope with various anthropogenic environments that differ from surrounding landscapes. Moreover, the differences in biotic and abiotic conditions among these habitats filter species with suitable traits and niche requirements. Here we aim to identify those attributes that promote species occurrence across and within urban habit...

Several studies have demonstrated that floras of the New World contain larger proportions of alien species than those of the Old World; however, the differences in fine-scale invasion patterns are poorly known. We compared the levels of invasion in analogous habitats of two environmentally similar regions in temperate North America and Europe (the...

AimWe hypothesize that the level of plant invasion at the scale of vegetation plots is affected by the different sizes of regional species pools of alien plants adapted to particular habitats. We test these species-pool effects in the context of alien species exchange between analogous habitats on two continents.LocationNorth and South Carolina, an...

The percentage of alien species found in a given habitat depends on the habitat vulnerability to invasion (invasibility) and the number of species introduced (propagule pressure). However, the global pool of alien species suited to a given habitat also varies. Here, we identify donor habitats of invasive alien plant species originating from Europe,...

Question: What is the relative importance of local site effects and selected important environmental variables in determining plant species composition? How do species respond to these environmental variables? Location: Ten mesotrophic grassland sites of high conservation value in southern England. Methods: Species cover was assessed in between 10...