My plans for PhD studies
My name is Ivo Pardus, and I am a new PhD candidate. I studied Nature Conservation at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, and my master’s thesis was about saproxylic beetles in primary beech forests. The title of my dissertation thesis is Assessing the Biodiversity and Carbon Storage in Primary and Managed Mixed Beech-dominated Forests of the Western Carpathians. My research is focused on mixed beech-dominated forests in the Western Carpathians.
In regions Malá Fatra, Velká Fatra, Poľana and Klenovský Vepor, all sites are in Slovakia. I have data from sixty plots established in primary forests and twenty-five in managed forests.
My main focus is on saproxylic beetles. Saproxylic beetles are a species-rich group that have become widely used for the purposes of bioindication. The abundance of rare and endangered species provides reliable information on the condition of the forest ecosystem. I want to put the functional and taxonomical biodiversity of caught individuals and test it with disturbance legacy and forest structure quality, like the age of the five oldest trees, canopy openness and volume of dead wood. We collected almost 4 thousand individuals of saproxylic beetles by flying traps in primary forests in Slovakia. We determined almost all of them. We found nearly four hundred species. I aim to find the relationship between forest structure, disturbances and the taxonomic and functional biodiversity of saproxylic beetles.
Well, we have looked at the first goal of my research. Now, I will move on to the next one. I am very excited about my second article because I want to look at forests in many aspects. I want to use data about carbon storage and carbon sequestration. I want to connect these data with information about biodiversity and forest structure. In the end, I want to find trade-offs and synergies between biodiversity and carbon and compare primary forests and managed forests. The result should be in my second article, but this is only my first suggestion.
To conclude, I would like to summarise. I will use data from 85 plots in 3 mountain mixed beech primary forest sites. We determined around 6000 beetles, and I would like to connect this data with data from another team member to make my research more complex and robust. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact me.
