Zygmunt Kącki’s research while affiliated with University of Business in Wrocław and other places

Inland salt marshes are recognized as habitats of unique and valuable vegetation at the European scale. There is still a lack of generalization regarding its vegetation syntaxonomy and environmental requirements, which is needed for its effective protection. To falsify our hypothesis about vegetation dependence on environmental requirements we aimed at description of the syntaxonomical units present in temperate European inland salt marshes and identification of their main environmental drivers. In our work we focused on the vegetation from the northern part of temperate salt marshes to limit confusion related to the geographical ranges of species. We collected the database of 968 vegetation plots from different European countries and applied the Cocktail method to analyze the data. Based on results, expert knowledge, existing syntaxonomical classifications and information from the literature, we identified diagnostic, constant and dominant species for individual syntaxonomical units. Then, we compiled maps of the vegetation unit distribution, and identified the most important environmental factors for the analyzed vegetation using statistical and multivariate methods, including canonical variate analysis. We classified the analyzed vegetation into nine classes, including two typical for salt-marsh vegetation – the Therosalicornietea and Festuco-Puccinellietea. Within these two classes, we distinguished two alliances and a total of five associations. The classes differs the most in terms of species preferences to salinity, soil moisture, light availability and soil nitrogen content. In addition salt marsh associations differ also by soil reaction and soil organic matter content. This provides direct implications for salt marsh sustainable management.

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 former three groups). Location Palaearctic biogeographic realm. Methods We used 126,524 plots of eight standard grain sizes from the GrassPlot database: 0.0001 m², 0.001 m², 0.01 m², 0.1 m², 1 m², 10 m², 100 m² and 1000 m² and calculated the mean richness and standard deviations, as well as maximum, minimum, median, and first and third quartiles for each combination of grain size, taxonomic group, biome, region, vegetation type and phytosociological class. Results Patterns of plant diversity in vegetation types and biomes differ across grain sizes and taxonomic groups. Overall, secondary (mostly semi-natural) grasslands and natural grasslands are the richest vegetation type. The open-access file ”GrassPlot Diversity Benchmarks” and the web tool “GrassPlot Diversity Explorer” are now available online (https://edgg.org/databases/GrasslandDiversityExplorer) and provide more insights into species richness patterns in the Palaearctic open habitats. Conclusions The GrassPlot Diversity Benchmarks provide high-quality data on species richness in open habitat types across the Palaearctic. These benchmark data can be used in vegetation ecology, macroecology, , biodiversity conservation and data quality checking. While the amount of data in the underlying GrassPlot database and their spatial coverage are smaller than in other extensive vegetation-plot databases, species recordings in GrassPlot are on average more complete, making it a valuable complementary data source in macroecology.

The ecology and species diversity of ephemeral wetland vegetation have been fairly well studied, but the biology of its characteristic species has rarely been investigated holistically. Here we combine previous results on the genetic diversity of a suitable model species (the diploid Cyperus fuscus) with new data on its historical and recent occurrence, its ecological and climatic niche, and the associated vegetation. Analysis of phytosociological relevés from Central Europe revealed a broad ecological niche of C. fuscus with an optimum in the Isoëto-Nanojuncetea class, extending to several other vegetation types. Overall species composition in the relevés highlight C. fuscus as a potential indicator of habitat conditions suitable for a range of other threatened taxa. Analysis of historical records of C. fuscus from the Czech Republic showed an increasing trend in the number of localities since the 1990s. It seems that recent climate warming allows the thermophilous C. fuscus to expand its range into colder regions. Isoëto-Nanojuncetea and Bidentetea species are well represented in the soil seed bank in both riverine and anthropogenic habitats of C. fuscus. Vegetation diversity has a weak negative effect and anthropogenic (compared to riverine) habitats have a strong negative effect on genetic diversity in this species.

The invasion of alien plant species is a serious problem for conservation and the maintenance of biodiversity in grasslands. Therefore, it is important to find environmental factors correlated with the distribution of invasive species in such areas. In this study, we examined the impacts of environmental factors operating at different spatial scales on the distribution of invasive species. The study area were located in the Sudetes Mountains, Poland (3800 km²). We sampled field data from 163 random plots located in grassland, among which there were 94 plots with invasive species and 69 plots without invasive species. For each plot, we collected data on resident vegetation (species richness, community structure), geodiversity (topography, soil type), environmental heterogeneity (landscape structure) and climate (temperature and precipitation). Since the factors examined are likely to operate at different spatial scales, we calculated values of environmental variables with different spatial scopes (10m² plot and buffers with 50, 250 and 1250 m radii). The probability of invasive plant presence was modeled using boosted regression trees (BRT). The results of our study showed that the distribution of invasive species is explained by factors operated at different spatial scale: in the finer scale the presence of invasive species was driven predominantly by the average Ellenberg's Indicator Values for soil moisture, in medium-scale by the average topographic wetness index and sum of edges, while at coarse-scale by temperature. It was also presented that the effect of drivers operating at fine-spatial scale is overwhelming by effect of drivers operating at coarse scale. From a practical point of view, the results demonstrate that effective grassland management should be planned on a larger spatial context, because focussing on the management of a single site cannot be successful.