Vegetation of beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) forests of Rychlebské hory Mts., Czech Republic.

Presented MSc.-thesis is a set of five texts designed for a publication in scientific journals. They are directly, indirectly, or partly based on data collected in 1998–2000 in the beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) forests of Rychlebské hory Mts., Czech Republic. The most important text is entitled “Beech forests vegetation of Rychlebské hory Mts. (Czech Republic) after 60 years.” It describes the vegetation changes and assesses the environmental processes that happened since the 1940s. As the main factor causing the observed species impoverishment and changes, air-borne industrial pollutants in particular are considered. This trend is further documented with the occurrence changes of Dentaira enneaphyllos L., a species characteristic for species-rich beech forests, presented as a proposed paper entitled “Retreat of Dentaria enneaphyllos L. in Rychlebské hory Mts., Czech Republic, and its probable reasons.” Vegetation records taken as a reference for assessment of the changes were not exactly fixed. It was therefore needed to examine the possible biases theoretically. This is presented in a text entitled “Studying vegetation dynamics using not exactly localized records.” Mainly based on species findings recorded during the vegetation sampling, a text “Vybrané vzácné a ohrožené rostliny Rychlebských hor a jejich severního podhůří” [Rare and threatened plants of the Rychlebské hory Mts. and the northern submountains] was written. It is a local floristic study. The fifth part of the thesis is the first version of a paper “Random versus subjective sample location in landscape scale, studied in beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) forests.” It is an attempt to interpret the properties of subjectively localised vegetation samples, if one wants to describe the vegetation variability in a landscape. This is also one of the main issues of the Central European vegetation science.