Today, Dominik Anýž has defended his Bachelor thesis entitled “Importance of butterflies for pollination of flowering plants”. He reviewed available information on floral traits important for butterfly visitors and discussed it in relation to the psychophilous pollination syndrome. Consequently, he…
Robert got the Purkyně Award
Last year, Jana Jersáková and Robert wrote a popularising paper on the current views on plant-pollinator interactions in Živa, the popularising journal of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Recently, this paper was awarded as the best popularising paper in 2018…
Tropical ecological conference in Edinburgh
Few weeks ago, Rob attended the conference Unifying Tropical Ecology: Strengthening collaborative science organised as the joint meeting of BES and gtö. Firstly, he presented our results on specialisation of pollination systems in higher elevations of Mount Cameroon. Two days…
Start of the transplant experiments
Last week, we have started with transplants of freshwater organisms between polluted and unpolluted industrial waters. It is an important part of our joint project with David Boukal’s group which aims to reveal how industrial pollution changes the structure of…
Krkonoše Mts. pollination networks
Many group members spent the past weeks in the field on the slopes of the Krkonoše Mts. in northern Czech Republic. We were collecting data, mainly focusing on recording floral visitors of flowering plants in semi-natural forests along their altitudinal…
Popularizing paper on the largest beetle
Jirka has recently written a popularizing paper on the largest beetle in the world, Titanus giganteus, for the Vesmír journal. Jirka has been studying titans in French Guyana since 2016 already, every year they are mainly radio tracking its adults.…
Back from the Kruger NP
Sylvain and Rob have again visited South African Kruger National Park to study dynamics of biodiversity in savanna. This time, they have spent three more weeks by sampling of moths and recording of bats. At the same time, birds were…
Lectures on biodiversity of postindustrial sites
During the past month, Rob gave several lectures on our research of biodiversity and restoration of postindustrial sites. At the end of November, Rob has visited ISA Lille where he taught the topic for two days, followed by an excursion into…
Popularising articles on our work
Recently, Rob co-authored three popularising papers related to our research topics. In the last issue of Živa, a popularising journal of the Czech Academy of Sciences, there are two papers written together with Jana Jersáková. The main paper focuses on mutual…
New paper on seasonality of rainforest butterflies and moths
Tropical ecosystems are often considered as highly stable environments with negligible seasonality. The opposite is true and many tropical biomes, including lowland rainforests, are strongly seasonal in both environmental conditions and dynamics of communities. This is evidenced also by our…