Software infrastructure and data pipelines established for technical interoperability within a cross-border cooperation for the flora of the Bohemian Forest.

Background: The timely and geographical resolutions, as well as the quantity and taxon concepts of records on the occurrence of plants near national borders is often ambiguous. This is due to the regional focus and different approaches of the contributing national and regional databases and networks of the neighbouring countries. Careful data transformation between national data providers is essential for understanding distribution patterns and its dynamics for organisms in areas along the national borders.

Pladias platform: Technical description of the database structure.

Background: Digitising and aggregating local floristic data is a critical step in the study of biodiversity. The integrative web-based platform Pladias, designed to cover a wide range of data on vascular plants, was recently developed in the Czech Republic. The combination of occurrence data with species characteristics opens many opportunities for data analysis and synthesis.

Bringing together evolution on serpentine and polyploidy: spatiotemporal history of the diploid-tetraploid complex of Knautia arvensis (Dipsacaceae).

Polyploidization is one of the leading forces in the evolution of land plants, providing opportunities for instant speciation and rapid gain of evolutionary novelties. Highly selective conditions of serpentine environments act as an important evolutionary trigger that can be involved in various speciation processes. Whereas the significance of both edaphic speciation on serpentine and polyploidy is widely acknowledged in plant evolution, the links between polyploid evolution and serpentine differentiation have not yet been examined.

Natural hybridization in tropical spikerushes of Eleocharis subgenus Limnochloa (Cyperaceae): Evidence from morphology and DNA markers.

Premise Of The Study: Natural hybridization represents an important force driving plant evolution and affecting community structure and functioning. Hybridization may be overlooked, however, among morphologically highly uniform congeners. An excellent example of such a group is Eleocharis subgenus Limnochloa, which has no reliably proven hybrids.

Towards resolving the Knautia arvensis agg. (Dipsacaceae) puzzle: primary and secondary contact zones and ploidy segregation at landscape and microgeographic scales.

Background And Aims: Detailed knowledge of variations in ploidy levels and their geographic distributions is one of the key tasks faced in polyploid research in natural systems. Flow cytometry has greatly facilitated the field of cytogeography by allowing characterization of ploidy levels at both the regional and population scale, and at multiple stages of the life cycle. In the present study, flow cytometry was employed to investigate the patterns and dynamics of ploidy variation in the taxonomically challenging complex Knautia arvensis (Dipsacaceae) and some of its allies (K.