Landscape is a complex and hierarchic system of interconnected ecosystems that are being developing over the time. The ecosystems are of both natural, semi-natural and man-made or man-influenced characters. Nowadays, in the period of likely climate changes and extensive land use demands, Environmental Protection and Landscape Heritage Restoration gain their importance for landscape services maintenance.

We deal with selected aspects of population dynamics in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Our emphasis is on mechanistic understanding of individual-level processes that give rise to population-level phenomena.

Our group studies carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus biogeochemical cycles in connection with the composition and functioning of soil microbial communities and their relations with plants. We study these interactions in various types of ecosystems such as temperate forests, wetlands (peatlands, swamp forests) and grasslands, but also in more exotic ones such as tundra or taiga. We are mainly interested in learning how natural disturbances and human impacts change the functioning of these ecosystems such as the rates of processes involved in carbon and nutrient transformations and their losses from the system, species and functional diversity of soil microbial community and plant-soil relations.

Our group, in close cooperation with the Institute of Hydrobiology, BC CAS, studies freshwater lentic ecosystems (e.g. glacial lakes in the Bohemia Forest, manmade reservoirs and fishponds), partly also streams and other interesting freshwaters, ensures specialized undergradute education in Hydrobiology (limnology) in both bachelor and master programs and guarrants the doctoral study programme in Hydrobiology/Limnology.