Just let nature work it out
During my studies of ecology, I have come across many exciting topics. I had the opportunity to experience nature on field trips, which was essential in the direction I eventually decided to take. The interdisciplinary field trip to the Pyrenees, where I first saw an endemic plant called Erodium glandulosum, was crucial. It caught my attention because of its dissimilarity to other “boring” species. From that moment on, I noticed every flower in bloom, looked at its shapes, and marveled at the diversity of the plants. I decided to use plants as a tool to investigate the ecological properties of the environment.
Firstly, I studied the processes in wetland alders, where I collected vegetation composition data and looked at ecological processes as a field worker. Then, I started researching on floodplain forests. I compared how the flora changed in the Litovelské Pomoraví protected landscape area. I collected phytocenological relevés in 2020 and included data from a botanical survey 1960 in my analyses.
Floodplain forests represent plant communities with high conservation value. However, lowland deciduous forests have been influenced by humans for centuries. Over the past decades, the increasing anthropogenetic impact has been one of the main drivers of ecosystem change. Abiotic and biotic environmental changes drive temporal and spatial vegetation changes; the most important are weather changes, succession, aging, or human influence by forestry management.
Humans have transformed nearly all lowland forests since the Neolithic period. Floodplain forests have been regularly managed by routine practices, e.g., coppicing, litter ranking, haymaking, and wood pasture. These activities created a mosaic of different habitats, a vital factor for biodiversity. The canopy was open, thus allowing the coexistence of light-demanding and shaded-tolerant species in the shrub and herb layer. Coppicing or coppicing-with-standards were essential silvicultural practices from traditional management in lowlands forests. Forest management was used from the 13th to the beginning of the 20th. When traditional management practices were abandoned, these low forests were converted to a high forest system.
The transformation started at the beginning of the 20th century, and since then, lowland forests have been experiencing substantial changes linked to shifts in community structure and composition. Open-canopy converted to closed-canopy, and light-demanding species declined or disappeared. Nowadays, this traditional management is not performed, which causes biomass accumulation. Expanding mesophilous tree species results in better-quality leaf litter and increases nutrient input, especially nitrogen, through anthropogenic activities. Therefore, oligotrophic species decline and are replaced by the expansion of nitrophilous species. Furthermore, a change in silvicultural practice shifted the age heterogeneity of the tree layer towards old age. Therefore, biotic and functional homogenization belongs to the threats of the future lowland forest communities.
My research on long-term change in floodplain forests in the PLA reveals systematic changes in local species diversity. The most notable trend is decreased species richness and significant changes in vegetation composition related to land-use changes. Most disappearing species are oligotrophic light-demanding herbs like Veronica chamaedris, Fragaria moschata, and Campanula persicifolia. My results reject the intensively managed high forest as proper management for floodplain forests. However, restoring traditional management fully with the current legislative framework is impossible.
And how else can conservationists help? They can promote and seek particular silviculture management or let the forest develop spontaneously, often the stated goal of management in protected areas. This may lead to a loss of the forest ecosystems’ character for which their protection was declared. Therefore, in the case of floodplain forests, the light and soil conditions play a crucial role in species distribution.
Forests have been with me throughout my studies. During my gap year, I joined a group of scientists from the Forest Ecology department as a field researcher. They do fantastic research called the REMOTE project (research on mountain temperate) in old-growth and primary forests, which play an essential role in providing a key ecosystem function for our society. These forests also provide habitat for many species that help maintain biodiversity. They strive for large-scale, strictly protected forest landscapes that will maintain biodiversity and mitigate climate change by storing carbon.
My curiosity led me to the Department of Forest Ecology. Here, I will analyze species distribution models, and this time not on plants but using a dataset of saproxylic beetles. These deadwood-bound beetles indicate the quality of forest stands characterized by temporal continuity. Based on these data, I seek to answer what the forest stands where saproxylic beetles occur have in common. Wisch me luck.
