Arthropod ecology and ecosystem functioning in agricultural landscapes. The Insect Ecology Group (Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Faculty of Environmental Sciences) studies how non-crop and management-created habitats — perennial wildflower strips, field margins, grasslands, cover crops — shape arthropod communities and the functions they deliver. Taxonomic coverage spans pollinators (wild bees, butterflies, hoverflies), natural enemies (carabids, spiders, ladybirds, parasitoids), herbivores and soil fauna.
What we can bring to a consortium:
replicated landscape-scale field experiments in Central Europe, and capacity to act as a partner site in distributed or coordinated multi-site experiments standardised, transferable field protocols: transect and pan-trap surveys, pitfall and suction sampling, sentinel-prey predation assays, litter-bag and tea-bag decomposition, bioturbation measurement species interaction networks and species–habitat networks, including recent work on cover crops mixed-effects and multivariate analysis of multi-site, multi-year community data established links to Czech farmers and to agri-environment scheme implementation
Biology of interactions
Conservation Biology
Ecology
Landscape ecology
We are looking to join a BiodivFuture consortium, most naturally under Theme A and Theme B.
Farmland habitats created or maintained by management are novel ecosystems in the sense of the call: assemblages with no historical analogue, largely sown rather than naturally assembled, and held in place by human decisions rather than succession. They range from short-lived cover crops to perennial flower strips and long-established margins, and in many European landscapes they now carry a substantial share of the remaining arthropod diversity. How far they function as analogues of the semi-natural habitats they replace, and how their communities develop over time, are open questions we would like to address in a transnational setting.
Our interest is in contributing comparable biodiversity and ecosystem-function measurements across contrasting regions and land-use histories, and in applying interaction- and habitat-network approaches so that novel habitats can be assessed by their structural role in the wider landscape, not only by species richness.
We can lead a work package on biodiversity monitoring or ecosystem functioning, or contribute as a partner site.
Members of our group will attend the joint Nordic Oikos–GfÖ conference (Odense, Denmark, 13–17 September 2026) and the BES Annual Meeting (Birmingham, UK, 14–17 December 2026). I will not be attending in person, but colleagues can meet potential partners on site. I am available for a video call at short notice at any point.