Volume 6 (2013): Issue 2 (December 2013)

Presented biogeographical division of the Czech Republic was elaborated initially for purposes of national and supra-national Ecological Networks. This division has its own hierarchy, consisting of both individual and typological biogeographical units. Higher units (biogeographical province, subprovince, and bioregion) are of individual character. Within the territory of the Czech Republic, two biogeographical provinces, four biogeographical subprovinces and 91 biogeographical regions have been distinguished. Hierarchically lower biogeographical units (biochora, group of geobiocoene types) have typological character; their characteristics in English are intended to be published later. All of the biogeographical units - with the exception of the group of geobiocoene types - are elaborated in maps of scale 1:50 000.

Clonal plants are very often among the first species to establish during primary succession. They may rapidly capture available space due to efficient vegetative propagation, but the question arises whether they may also rely on seed bank or seed rain during expansion and recovery after a possible disturbance. This question becomes increasingly important in extreme conditions of industrial deposit investigated in this study. We explored the two aforementioned seed sources in a clonal grass Calamagrostis epigejos within an ecotoxicologically stressed environment - abandoned tailings containment (former sedimentation basin) - from manganese-ore mining. Density of seeds found in seed rain was 617 seeds m-2, and in soil seed bank 220 seeds m-2, based on an autumn survey. Soil seed pool was almost depleted until the following spring as only 13 seeds m-2 were present. This pattern contrasted with the capacity of C. epigejos to build a persistent soil seed bank as shown by a burial experiment. Seed rain was thus identified to be the sole reliable seed source that may assist in recovery of this species after a possible disturbance

This paper presents an evaluation of full-area floristic mapping of floodplain forest in Tvrdonice forest district (Židlochovice Forest Enterprise) based on a single forest stand inventory. The study area encompasses 2,200 ha of forests, where 769 segments were inventoried, and 46,886 single records about presence of vascular plant species were catalogued. We found 612 species (incl. subspecies and hybrids), out of which 514 were herbs, 98 were woody plants, 113 were endangered species and 170 were adventive species. The average area of a segment is 2.86 ha. The mean number of species per segment is 60.97 in a range of 4-151.

A theoretical approach of a hierarchical spatial framework concept for spring habitats is presented in this paper. The concept is based on existing classifications of running water and on empirical studies of spring ecosystems. Hierarchical spatial categorisation is applied to study spring areas of forest ecosystems in low mountain ranges of Germany. A spatial concept for springheads is designed to aid the illustration and understanding of functional, structural and process relationships on different scales. Here, multiple geographical dimensions and hydrological scales and their terms are compared in an integrated system. This integrated approach is needed if a water body is to be studied as an ecosystem rather than just a hydrological system. The goal of this hierarchical spatial framework is to establish a conceptual foundation for the study of fauna-microhabitat relationships and for the analysis of the substrate preference of the invertebrate fauna of spring ecotones. This paper presents a surface water typology for patchy forest springs with different habitat types. Most of these habitat types of the 152 investigated springs are dominated by organic substrate types as micro habitats (74.7 %) with subdominant mineral substrate types. Therefor the most dominant habitat type (HT) is “CPOM dominated, Psammopelal abounded” HT (19.7 %), followed by the HT “Macrophytes dominated, Psammopelal abounded” (13.2 %) and the HT “CPOM dominated, Microlithal abounded” (9.9 %). More underrepresented habitat types are pure mineral substrate types (10.5 %) like the HT “Psammopelal dominated” (5.9 %). There were also less artificial habitat types (7.2 %), because the study focused on undisturbed spring habitats inside the field survey.