Plant diversity analysis and synthesis centre (PLADIAS)

Plant diversity analysis and synthesis centre (PLADIAS)

The aim of the project is to develop an integrated database and online information system on plant diversity in the Czech Republic, linking it to related international databases and using it to test fundamental hypotheses about evolution and maintenance of temperate plant diversity across scales from local to continental.

Central Europe belongs to areas with the best available botanical data globally, which makes it an ideal model region to study evolution of temperate plant diversity and community assembly. However, this potential is often unexplored and many facets of temperate plant diversity are thus poorly understood due to limited integration of existing data. PLADIAS Centre of Excellence is a globally unique project, which will, for the first time, use ecoinformatics approaches to integrate all available data on flora and vegetation for a national territory in a single database, update them and link them with newly collected data. The resulting database will be interfaced with international databases, and made available to a broader scientific community and the public in an online portal. For the PLADIAS team this will open novel ways of addressing fundamental questions of plant community ecology and macroecology, namely trade-offs in life histories of large species sets, region-wide community assembly from available species pools and determinants of plant invasions.

Cooperating institutions:
Masaryk University, Faculty of Science
Institute of Botany AS CR
University of South Bohemia, Faculty of Science