Department of Vegetation Ecology - The Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences

The Database contains vegetation plots from forest ecosystems mainly from the Czech Republic. Plots are of three various types: resurveyed historical plots (about 4 thousand samples), permanent plots (600 plots) and experimental plots (about a thousand of samples). The databases are continuously extended and utilized in current and prepared research projects. Vegetation data are supplemented by environmental data including soil properties (see Soil database).

The historical database contains 50 000 of archive records about the forest management and species composition and other aspects of the forest vegetation over the region of the historical Moravia and Silesia. For its comprehensiveness, it is a unique european database. The main data resources of the database were medieval charters, zemské desky, urbaria, forestry management plans, forest maps, the Josephian and Stable cadastre and other archive materials providing information about the forests and forest management in the period from 11th to 19th century. The most of the used archival documents are deposited in the Moravian Provincial Archive in Brno. Historical sources have been appended by information found in the forestry literature. The database was created by the team of historians led by P. Szabó during the ERC funded project LONGWOOD.

The archaeological database contains more than 19.000 records of human presence from Mesolithic up to the Early Medieval Period from Moravia. The archive of the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, served as the main source of information, which was collected under the supervision of J. Kolář during the ERC funded project LONGWOOD. Published archaeological data are partially added to the archival records. The dataset serves for quantified modeling of past human activities on different scales, which is used mostly in combination with palaeoecological and climatic models.

References:
Kolář, J., Tkáč, P., Macek, M., Szabó, P., 2016. Archaeology and historical ecology: the archaeological database of the LONGWOOD ERC project. Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 46, 539–554. https://doi.org/10.11588/ak.2016.4.74818

This dataset represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of radiocarbon data in the Czech Republic so far. In 2021, the database had 1579 dated samples from 357 sites from the Mesolithic to the Middle Ages (10.000 BC – 1.250 AD). The database takes the form of a simple table and is freely downloadable, as is the article describing it. The database will be updated once a year and the latest version will always be stored on ZENODO.

Link to the database:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5728242

Link to the article:
https://openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/joad.85/

Soil database

The Soil database contains data from pedological analyses of several thousands of samples collected from plots in the forests of the Czech Republic. Samples are archived, analyzed and supplemented by new material. Pedological analyses are demanding on funding and analytic infrastructure. All costs were from the resources of the Institute of Botany, mostly grant projects.

The collection of seeds and fruits of vascular plants comprises over 4000 samples mainly of the central European species, but also from other parts of the World. The collection has been built on the Brno department of the Institute of Botany in the past fifty years. Currently we strive of further development and use of the collection for scientific and other purposes.

The collection serves as reference for determination of material from soil samples (living seeds; soil seed bank) as well as from fossil sediments (see the Database of macrorests). Our aim is reconstruction of species composition from both resources.

The collection is open for public use.

Contact: Markéta Chudomelová