Zdenka Preislerová

• Masaryk University

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...

Aim In salt-affected environments, salinity shapes ecosystem functions and species composition. Apart from salinity, however, we know little about how soil chemical factors affect plant species. We hypothesized that specific ions, most of which contribute to salinity, co-determine plant niche differentiation. We asked if the importance of ions diff...

The first comprehensive phytosociological classification of all vegetation types in Europe (EuroVegChecklist; Applied Vegetation Science, 2016, 19, 3-264) contained brief descriptions of each type. However, these descriptions were not standardized and mentioned only the most distinct features of each vegetation type. The practical application of th...

Aim The first comprehensive checklist of European phytosociological alliances, orders and classes (EuroVegChecklist) was published by Mucina et al. (2016, Applied Vegetation Science , 19 (Suppl. 1), 3–264). However, this checklist did not contain detailed information on the distribution of individual vegetation types. Here we provide the first maps...

Aims Understanding fine-grain diversity patterns across large spatial extents is fundamental for macroecological research and biodiversity conservation. Using the GrassPlot database, we provide benchmarks of fine-grain richness values of Palaearctic open habitats for vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens and complete vegetation (i.e., the sum of the...

Steppe‐tundra is considered to have been a dominant ecosystem across northern Eurasia during the Last Glacial Maximum. As the fossil record is insufficient for understanding the ecology of this vanished ecosystem, modern analogues have been sought, especially in Beringia. However, Beringian ecosystems are probably not the best analogues for more so...

Aim Soil pH is considered an important driver of fine‐scale plant species richness in terrestrial ecosystems. However, it is unclear to what extent this relationship is influenced by precipitation, which often directly affects both soil pH and species richness. We asked: (1) what is the relationship between fine‐scale vascular plant species richnes...

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...

Soil pH is a key predictor of plant species occurrence owing to its effect on the availability of nutrients and phytotoxic metals. Although regional differences in realized soil pH niche (‘niche shifts’) have been reported since the 19th century, no study has disentangled how they are influenced by spatial differences in substrate availability, mac...

We provide an inventory of the sites and vegetation types in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that contain the highest numbers of vascular plant species in small areas of up to 625 m2. The highest numbers of species were recorded in semi-natural grasslands, in which we report four new world records for fine-scale species richness: 17 species of vasc...

Knowledge of present-day communities and ecosystems resembling those reconstructed from the fossil record can help improve our understanding of historical distribution patterns and species composition of past communities. Here, we use a unique data set of 570 plots explored for vascular plant and 315 for land-snail assemblages located along a 650-k...

Urban habitats differ in their disturbance regimes, which act as an environmental filter determining plant community species composition. This is why plant communities in different urban habitats provide a suitable model for studying the effects of disturbance on phylogenetic diversity. We explore how phylogenetic diversity varies across urban plan...

Upland fringes of the White Carpathians (Czech Republic) are known to support grasslands with the world’s highest local plant species richness. We investigated whether this unusually high plant richness has a parallel in snail communities, whether patterns of species composition of snail and plant communities in grasslands co-vary and how they are...

Central European dry grasslands are remarkably diverse plant communities that occur at the western edge of the Eurasian forest-steppe zone and harbour many species of continental distribution. Although their plant community types have been described in detail, the diversity patterns and their environmen-tal determinants are still poorly known for t...

Question: Diversification of grassland management is recommended as a tool for conservation of different taxonomic groups living in those habitats. How resistant and resilient are species-rich grasslands in terms of plant species richness and vegetation composition to short-term, small-scale perturbations caused by changes inmanagement practice? Lo...

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...

Biomass is an important ecological property, but its measurement is destructive and time-consuming and therefore generally missing for historical vegetation plots. Here we propose and test indirect estimation of herbaceous biomass using models based on easily obtainable variables, namely plant height and cover. We compare these models with Ellenber...

Questions We discovered forests with very high local numbers of vascular plant species in southern Siberia. Are these the most species-rich forests of the Eurasian boreal and temperate zones, and which factors cause such high species richness? Location Altai Mountains in southern Siberia, Altai Republic, Russia. Methods We sampled vegetation a...

Semi-dry grasslands in the White Carpathian (Bílé Karpaty) Mountains on the Czech-Slovak border are famous for their extremely high species richness. In places they contain more than 130 species of vascular plants per 100m2 and for some plot sizes they hold world records in the number of vascular plant species, but the reasons for this are poorly u...

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 In contrast to non‐forest vegetation, the species richness–productivity (SR‐P) relationship in forests still remains insufficiently explored. Several studies have focused on the diversity of the tree layer, but the species richness of temperate deciduous forests is mainly determined by their species‐rich herb layer. The factors controlling herb...

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 The diversity changes that occurred in Central European forests during the early Holocene can be better understood using ecological knowledge of modern analogues of these forests, which occur in far Eastern Europe. Here we compare the diversity of vascular plants, bryophytes and snails among different forest types of the Southern Urals to provi...

Aim Shells of fossil molluscs are important for palaeoecological reconstructions. However, the habitat requirements of snail species typical of central European full‐glacial loess sediments are poorly known because most of them became very rare or extinct in Europe. The recent discovery of an almost complete extant assemblage of such species in mou...

A malacological study at 41 forest sites in the Southern Urals (Bashkortostan, Russia) conducted in 2007 gave the first quantitative data about land snail assemblages from this region. These data were used to identify the main patterns and predictors of snail species richness and composition, to assess the relations of snail assemblages to vegetati...

The effect of plot size was tested on heterogeneous and homogeneous data sets that were obtained by sampling grassland and forest vegetation on plots differing in size. Mean EIV for relevés revealed no differences among data sets from various plot sizes or between homogeneous and heterogeneous data sets. This is probably due to a similar indicator...

Southern Siberian mountain ranges encompass strong climatic contrasts from the relatively oceanic northern foothills to strongly continental intermountain basins in the south. Landscape-scale climatic differences create vegetation patterns, which are analogous to the broad-scale vegetation zonation over large areas of northern Eurasia. In their sou...

Aim Many high‐latitude floras contain more calcicole than calcifuge vascular plant species. The species pool hypothesis explains this pattern through an historical abundance of high‐pH soils in the Pleistocene and an associated opportunity for the evolutionary accumulation of calcicoles. To obtain insights into the history of calcicole/calcifuge pa...

Numerical classification of 2653 geographically stratified relevés of weed vegetation from the Czech and Slovak Republics was performed with cluster analysis. Diagnostic species were determined for each of the seven main clusters using statistical measures of fidelity. The classification reflected clear distinctions between lowland (mostly calcicol...

Questions: Do ordination patterns differ when based on vegetation samples recorded in plots of different size? If so, how large is the effect of plot size relative to the effects of data set heterogeneity and of using presence/absence or cover-abundance data? Can we combine plots of different size in a single ordination? Methods: Two homogeneous an...

Question: What are the main broad-scale spatial and temporal gradients in species composition of arable weed communities and what are their underlying environmental variables? Location: Czech Republic and Slovakia. Methods: A selection of 2653 geographically stratified relevés sampled between 1954–2003 was analysed with direct and indirect ordinati...

In European phytosociology, variable plot sizes are traditionally used for sampling different vegetation types. This practice may generate problems in current vegetation or habitat survey projects based on large data sets, which include relevés made by many authors at different times. In order to determine the extent of variation in plot sizes used...

The effects of increasing plot size on two measures of heterogeneity of plant communities, evenness and β-diversity, were investigated using four data sets consisting of nested vegetation plots of increasing size. Two forest data sets included plots of 49−961 m 2 and two grassland data sets plots of 1-49 m 2 . Evenness was measured with E var index...

1 Ústav botaniky a zoologie, Přírodovědecká fakulta Masarykovy univerzity v Brně, Kotlářská 2, 611 37 Brno, zdenkao@sci.muni.cz; 2 Botanický ústav AV ČR, Dukelská 135, 379 01 Třeboň, klimes@butbn.cas.cz. Abstract Plot sizes recommended for phytosociological sampling vary by several orders of magnitude. Even within a single vegetation type, differen...