Our lab-member, Martin Adámek, successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis “Wildfire as an ecological factor in the forests of Central Europe” at the Depatment of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University. The main result of the thesis is that wildfire is an important factor for certain Central European Scots pine forest formations, for example for pine forests of sandstone regions that occur on sites potentially favourable for beech forests. These pine forests can be thus regarded as a non-equilibrium state maintained by recurrent wildfires through millennia. Fire also positively influences the species diversity of such forests in the long run.
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