Vojtěch Abraham

Charles University in Prague | CUNI · Department of Botany

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a pollen-based quantitative reconstruction of Holo-cene vegetation in order to update a perspective on natural vegetation in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. As a secondary aim we compare composition of this reconstructed Holocene vegetation with the composition of potential natural vegetation (PNV sensu...

The REVEALS model is a tool for recalculating pollen data into vegetation abundances on a regional scale. We explored the general effect of selected parameters by performing simulations and ascertained the best model setting for the Czech Republic using the shallowest samples from 120 fossil sites and data on actual regional vegetation (60 km radiu...

Tracing human-vegetation interactions that occurred in the past has always been one of the key topics of paleoecology. Here we use the pollen and archaeological databases available for the Czech Republic to determine links between individual pollen taxa and archaeological data and search for the spatial scales of comparability. The datasets include...

Context The determination of autecological preferences based on long-term vegetation dynamics is hampered by the lack of realistic estimates for past occurrence and abundance patterns. Palaeoecological record has still rather character of points than spatially continuous maps. Objectives To infer long-term autecological preferences of trees from r...

Human population has affected natural ecosystems since prehistoric times in many ways, causing disturbances in existing ecosystems and creating novel habitats, and altering the colonisation and extinction rates with potentially long‐lasting effects on biodiversity. Here, we explored the pervasive effects of past human occupancy on present‐day diver...

Estimating past population dynamics has become a major research topic for archaeology, which uses several proxies for studying past demography. The Czech Republic represents a unique region with abundant digital archaeological and palynological datasets comprising tens of thousands of records covering the whole Holocene. We used these datasets to q...

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...

The collection of modern, spatially extensive pollen data is important for the interpretation of fossil pollen assemblages and the reconstruction of past vegetation communities in space and time. Modern datasets are readily available for percentage data but lacking for pollen accumulation rates (PARs). Filling this gap has been the motivation of th...

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...

zvláštní příloha časopisu Šumava, celé soutěžní číslo: https://www.npsumava.cz/navstivte-sumavu/casopis-sumava/mozkovka-2020/

The vegetation history of lowland woodlands in Central Europe is closely related with human activities. Our study is focused on the evaluation of a large archaeo–anthralogical dataset from a large–scale territory in Central Europe. Our dataset contains about 240 891 charcoal records from 474 localities. Our research focuses on the reconstruction of...

In the lower forested mountain ranges of Europe, human impact on nature is usually confined to the written history of the Middle Ages. Our research in the Šumava mountains aims to specify the nature and intensity of human impact on vegetation, especially during agricultural prehistory. We use results from a multidisciplinary study of the unique La...

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...

The collection of modern spatially extensive pollen data are important for the interpretation of fossil pollen diagrams. Such datasets are readily available for percentage data but lacking for pollen accumulation rates (PAR). Filling this gap has been the motivation of the pollen monitoring network, whose contributors monitored pollen deposition in...

We analysed a continuous andwell-dated record of pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, geochemistry and plant macroremains from the best preserved peat bog in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands (Czech Republic). Dářko peat bog is an isolated site of a pine bog woodland dominated by the central-European endemic Pinus uncinata subsp. uliginosa. It is protect...

Fire occurrence is driven by a complex interplay between vegetation, climatic, landform and human factors making it challenging to separate the individual effect of each variable. Here we present a reconstruction of the Holocene biomass burning history of two regions located in the Central European temperate zone that differ in the timing of the Mi...

Understanding pollen-vegetation relationships is crucial for accurate land-cover and climate reconstructions, yet important parameters for quantifying past vegetation abundance are mostly unknown for large parts of Europe harbouring temperate thermophilous ecosystems. We collected pollen and vegetation data in central-eastern Europe, a region cover...

Stand-scale palaeoecology in sandstone landscapes provides insight into contrasting Holocene forest succession trajectories. Sharp geomorphological gradients in this investigated area, which in addition have never been deforested during the Holocene, provide a good model for upscaling the local vegetation histories to the wider territory of Central...

The paper deals with landscape and settlement development between ca. 300 BC and AD 600 in a defined area of the northern Czech Republic. Despite favourable natural conditions, human occupation of the area did not begin until the end of the first millennium BC. Natural soil and vegetation development therefore lasted longer than in the traditionall...

Disturbances such as fires and grazing have major impacts on biodiversity. While it has been suggested that species richness is highest with intermediate levels of disturbance, currently there is no consensus due to an absence of data covering large temporal and spatial scales. We developed a new method to examine disturbance‐diversity relationship...

Microscopic objects have shapes and ornamentations, which are worth showing. Presentation of pollen through pictures and the sharing of copies in handouts is possible. However, in exercise books students need to cut and stick the pictures, which does not always look good. I present stamps as a artistic technique for teaching and spreading pictures...

A long-term perspective is a crucial dimension for understanding the present-day composition and structure of the Czech flora and vegetation. We outline processes that were important for the development of the present-day diversity of flora and vegetation including extinctions of taxa and ecological mechanisms operating within glacial-interglacial...

This paper combines complex archaeological records from excavations of sandstone rockshelters with paleobotanical investigations in the adjacent wetlands of Northern Bohemia, Czech Republic. Several pollen diagramms from nearby peatbogs are used to document the paleoenvironmental development from the Late Glacial to the Middle Holocene. In addition...

We aim to obtain composition of the regional vegetation from the pollen record in the high mountains, to use it in the interpretation of the pollen record from the lowlands via a Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm (LRA), and to then compare the pedoanthracological data with the LRA result based on dissimilarity coefficient. We used five pollen sequ...

Although charcoal and pollen analyses have been used for many years for the reconstruction of the vegetation history, the combination and comparison of their records is still not commonly used. Our study focuses on the lowland region of Litovelské Pomoraví in NE Czech Republic, which is characterised by the presence of long-term human activities. T...

The aims of this article are, first, to investigate the middle- and upper-Holocene woodland history along the altitudinal gradient between the lowlands and uplands of Central Europe (190–550 m a.s.l.) and, second, to outline possible biases inherent in the charcoal record based on a comparison with the pollen record and its known biases. Our anthra...

Aim Projections of human impact on the environment and biodiversity patterns are crucial if we are to prevent their destruction. Such projections usually involve the assumption that the same human activities always affect biodiversity in the same way, either in geographically distant areas within the same time‐scale or in the same areas in differen...

The study deals with the prehistoric development of the Bezdez - Doksy region in Northern Bohemia, with special regard to the excavation of the La Tene settlement at Okna that is cautiously ascribed to the Kobyly group. The settlement is assessed according to the data obtained by palaeobotanic, geobotanic and sedimentologic research of the site as...

The phylogeographic pattern of the temperate shrub Lonicera nigra (Caprtfoliaceae) in Europe was inferred from molecular and fossil data. Population samples and pollen data from most of the contemporary natural distribution were analysed. While chloroplast DNA sequences revealed no intraspecific variation, AFLP data show a non-random geographic pat...

This paper reviews the data on quaternary palynological sequences collected in the Czech Republic, attempts to store them in the Czech Quaternary Palynological Database (PALYCZ) and outlines a possible use for regional syntheses. Work on pollen stratigraphies done over the last hundred years has yielded a very large amount of data for this region....

The origin of this book was somewhat more complex than is usual amongst titles of this kind. First we aimed to publish a volume of long abstracts from a conference of the “Czech Archaeobotany Working Group” that took place in âeské Budûjovice, South Bohemia, in January 2006. This group is an informal collection of people dedicated to archaeobotany...