Title: Botanist to examine Czech invasive plants' conduct overseas
[Prague Daily Monitor- 9 September 2010] -- Botanist Petr Pysek has received a 30-million-crown grant from the Czech Academy of Sciences for examining the way Czech "invasive" plants behave overseas, which he says will be an unparalleled research in terms of its size as well as geographical and time ranges. The six-year research of Czech invasive plants in North America, South Africa and New Zealand will help explain why some plant species are invasive and some not. The results might play role in permitting plant imports, Pysek told journalists yesterday. While most specialists in invasive botany study the plants that have been imported to their homeland, Pysek decided to do the opposite. He will focus on how some plants, which are common in the Czech Republic, behave on other continents.
Apart from biogeographical experiments, Pysek and his colleagues work with international databases which they have helped complete and which enable to forecast the next trends in the dynamics of the regional and continental invasions depending on various scenarios of the demographic and climatic development.
The new grant will enable Pysek to answer the question of what is behind the invasive behaviour of plants and whether plant species, after being imported to a foreign region, affect the local plants otherwise than the domestic prevailing species.
Some species, after being imported abroad, undergo genetic changes or get rid of their natural enemies, which helps them spread and prevail. Others, however, only continue behaving in the way they behaved in their old homeland.
The same species may behave differently in various regions, depending on the climate, on the habitats on offer and on soil microorganisms, Pysek said.
Some of the Czech invasive species are interesting by behaving "decently" at home, while in North America they massively invade pastures, thus causing economic damage, he said.
Pysek is a deputy director of the Academy of Sciences Botany Institute. He also teaches at the Charles University's Faculty of Sciences. He sits on the editors' boards of five international journals in which he has published 140 articles. He is the editor-in-chief of the Czech Botany Society's magazine Preslia CR. His team participates in a number of international scientific projects.