iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Kryštof Chytrý

Milan Chytrý @milanchytry.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Can we trust? Yes, we can trust estimates of species turnover, but estimates of changes in species richness are less reliable. Our new article in the Journal of Ecology: doi.org/10.1111/1365... @journalofecology.bsky.social @iavs5.bsky.social

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

And since we are doing all of this in our free time without generating any profit, we have opened a fundraising campaign. So if you want to send some money to biodiversity conservation. Think about us: donio.cz/zanechte-sto... ❤️❤️❤️

donio.cz

Zanechte stopu v pálavské krajině

Mezi Kočičí skálou a mandloňovým sadem leží 1,5 ha pole – bariéra pro lidi i přírodu. Chceme ho koupit a proměnit v živý krajinný koridor: sad, květnatou louku a bezpečnou pěší trasu, která propojí Pá...

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

We now have an opportunity to buy a field that lies right between one of our grassland strips and a small but relic protected area. It just feels like a once-in-a-lifetime offer. Just imagine we would no longer be creating just stepping stones, but a genuine corridor for native biodiversity. 🤯🤯

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I hope I am not naive to believe that we are creating something valuable that will last for generations. That we are making a real change. Nonetheless, it's a never-ending and tough work. And now we need your help.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

And it works. Even though there are only a few initiators behind this, we regularly get dozens to more than a hundred people to come to help with planting trees, pruning and other campaigns. Our grassland strips are now regularly used by the people, helping them discover the landscape around.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

And on parcels that were burrowed to us by the municipality (already well over 10 ha), we have started creating landscape structures (extensively managed grasslands and open landscape orchards) in a way that we believe maximises their potential for restoring the diversity of native species.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Well, maybe not entirely. In the past years, we have managed to establish a community-based NGO putting together locals with very different backgrounds, incl. biologists (me & my wife 😁), conservationists, landscape architects, artists, graphical designers, farmers, wine makers and many others.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Because the diversity of the Central European landscape is tied to the traditional, fine-scale agriculture; to care of locals that spend time in the landscape that surrounds them. If we want to restore biodiversity, we need to restore this connection. Quite naive, isn't it?

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

For sure, it is a step in the right direction. However, it mostly leads to landscape structures that are meant by their creators to be self-maintained and while such structures indeed have their place in the landscape, they do support only a very limited number of native species. Why? (c) Wiki

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

The time is ripe enough to make a change. And indeed, especially after the 2015-2019 drought waves, there have been various governmental funds for "landscape structure restoration". Those mostly lead to small hedge- and tree-planting campaigns on parcels owned by municipalities.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

The Czech Republic is one of the countries with the largest parcel sizes in Europe. It is our sad communist heritage, which was made even worse during the 90s privatisation of agriculture. So the state of our cultural landscape is simply terrible. ↓ The CZE-AT border illustrates it well enough.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

PLEASE SHARE & DONATE! ❤️ In short, our NGO is raising money to buy a field for (biologically-informed) and community-based ecological restoration. donio.cz/zanechte-sto... A bit more of the context in a 🧵↓↓↓

donio.cz

Zanechte stopu v pálavské krajině

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Stal jsem se občasným přispěvatelem Deníku N. Tento článek je o v České republice mizícím fenoménu štěrkonosných řek. Konkrétně teda o vzácné biotě, která je na ně vázaná, a pokud se něco nezmění, tak z české přírody zmizí spolu s ním. Odemčeno: denikn.cz/2011191/kdyz...

denikn.cz

Když řekám nedovolíme divočit, přispíváme k větším povodním i ke ztrátě nenahraditelných živých druhů

Přirozená dynamika některých řek, zejména horských, udržuje krajinu živou a povodně v přiměřeném rozsahu. Člověk do spontánního divočení řek často zasahuje tak, že škody jsou větší než užitek.

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Reposted by Kryštof Chytrý

Botanospol - Czech Botanical Society @botanospol.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

1/2 Tůně mohou překypovat životem. Ale také nemusí. Jejich budování může mít na rostlinná společenstva a ohrožené druhy rostlin neblahé následky. Více ve stanovisku ČBS, které nově naleznete na našich stránkách.

obr. 1: Nově vybudovaná tůň, která odvodnila kdysi vlhkou louku a začala zarůstat (foto: Kryštof Chytrý).

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

I saw you there! Thanks for joining, Patrick.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Thanks Tommaso! It’s gonna be some kind of post processing of the dynamic simulation models. Really curious about that.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Thanks! The job is not yet done and not even my funding, only the PhD 😁. We are now running the final simulations on the Schrankogel and hopefully in the coming months, we will make some really cool papers.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Thanks a lot for those nice words. It was a fun and enlightening discussion indeed. I really enjoyed that you and Bente brought different perspectives to it.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

But we made it through, and the lessons learnt were indeed valuable, often changing our perception and views. For instance, the direct role of microclimate temperature on plants is often overestimated; rather than a physiological constraint, it is a trigger to other, much more complex processes.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

To our big surprise, fine-scale species distributions turned out to be much more elusive to capture. Nearly all the data analysis trials we did, we found something unexpected, often pointing to factors that we didn’t measure. This made things quite complicated and papers difficult to publish.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

I opted for this all, because I was fascinated by topography. I worked with topography in grasslands before, and scaling to microtopography and microclimate was an attractive challenge. So the plan was clear: use these fine-scale environmental data to explore how they explain where palnts grow.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

We were two PhD students to handle this data, and it clearly became a way of living. For the next 5 years, I have spent around 2 summer months between 2000 and 3500 m a.s.l. having no idea about the date or time. Constantly exploring how bad the weather needs to be to make work impossible.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

The idea was so ambitious that it was unclear from the beginning if it was even feasible: to obtain as much fine-scale environmental and vegetation data as possible from one single mountain, permanently fix ~4k plant individuals across the mountain, and transplant another ~4k individuals and more.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Yesterday, I defended my PhD thesis at @univie.ac.at. Thanks @vvandvik.bsky.social and Bente Graae for reviewing it and Stefan Dullinger for supervising. I tasted quite a bit of science during my Master's by leading 5 papers and doing lots of field research. But this was different. Extraordinary.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Anyway, after seven(!) desc rejections, which is by far my record, we made it through in @oikosjournal.bsky.social. Thanks, Oikos, for appreciating the resolution over extent! ❤️ nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Reconsidering climatic predictors for high‐resolution niche models of alpine plants

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

The strength of our data is, however, not supposed to be its spatial extent, but its spatial resolution and related sampling density of 900 sites covering a lot of the fine-scale variation of this mountain. Which is a very rare thing. But apparently not easily sold to journals.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Up to now, it wasn't very difficult. But now, the process of getting this published has started. From basically every journal, we got quite nice and often positive constructive feedback, but concerns about the size of the study area, which is only one mountain.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Second, we tried to narrow this diversity down, keeping on mind all to colinearity in these data. It's dificult to put it in 250 words, so just check our paper. ;-) Eventually we foud out that only 6 variables are enough to model even a quite large number of species. Out of 250!

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

First, we looked at how they correlate with species distributions, comparing them with Bioclim variables most commonly used for this purpose. And, a first surprise, they were not doing well at all. That's not a criticism of Bioclim, but for microclimate-based models, they are probably not the best.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Even though we only used soil temperature from our Schrankogel loggers, we reached approximately 250 temperature variables.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

The story started sometime in 2023 when I wanted to test if microclimate temperatures are indeed multifaceted as Christian Körner and Erika Hiltbrunner emphasized in their 90 ways to describe plant temperature. doi.org/10.1016/j.pp...

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

This paper was the most frustrating journey I've ever gone through... Nevertheless, after nearly two years, the paper is finally published.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Thanks @jlembrechts.bsky.social for this blog post about our new Oikos paper! Love your blog. :-)

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Reposted by Kryštof Chytrý

Jonas Lembrechts @jlembrechts.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

How to not be swamped by your microclimate data? The rise of microclimate data may have opened Pandora’s box. Gone are the days of simple bioclimatic variables — now heads spin trying to summarize these timeseries. A much-needed paper by @krystofchytry.bsky.social: 🔗 the3dlab.org/2025/11/11/h...

the3dlab.org

How to not be swamped by your microclimate data

Microclimate data are finally finding their way more routineously into ecological models – and rightly so. Hooray for that! The growing availability of in-situ measurements is helping us brid…

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

This year we’re, in addition to the regular business, using our fine-scale temperature maps to explore isolated cold spots in lower elevations to see if nival species survive there. Quite dangerous sites these cold spots…

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Fieldwork in the Alps. 5th year on the same mountain. Even this calf wonders why are we still doing that.

Calf in the middle of alpine road. Foggy mountains behind.

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Reposted by Kryštof Chytrý

European Vegetation Survey @euroveg.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

John Rodwell became an Honorary Member of the European Vegetation Survey. John is one of the most prominent vegetation ecologists in Europe.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

I suspect a badger. Someone was repeatedly pulling off our EMS water potential logger (whole buried) while leaving TMS-4 standing right next to it... So now the EMS WP's got a fancy 2-sided + top cage that enables readout from a side. Let's see if that works.

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

In past, Daniel Kokotajlo made future projections on the development of AI that, over time, turned out as quite accurate. This is his vision of what might happen over the coming years. The projection are worrying, especially in the light of the recent disbalance of political order ai-2027.com/race

ai-2027.com

AI 2027

A research-backed AI scenario forecast.

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Reposted by Kryštof Chytrý

Birds on the Move @birdsmove.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Every year, fewer #WhiteStorks cross the Straits of Gibraltar on their annual migratory journey. In this paper, we unveil the mechanisms driving the recent and rapid loss of their migratory behaviour. 👉https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1365-2656.70035

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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

When you're already out of wood for this heating season (yes, my case) but you need to heat the room a bit... 🫠

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