Podrobné vyhledávání v článcích

One of the significant preconditions for enhancing and improving nature conservation, biodiversity protection respectively in protected areas is ecotourism development, undoubtedly strengthening job opportunity/employment and economic prosperity in the countryside and at the same time also local community involvement in nature conservation (Eagles et al. 2002).

National parks are large, specially protected areas. They aim to protect natural ecosystems, support undisturbed natural processes, as well as human-determined biodiversity. However,  as the national park mission, in addition to the above mentioned, also includes enabling sustainable development, national park management authorities urgently need to ensure long-term monitoring of the fulfilling both the conservation goals and the mission. A transboundary project of the administrations of the Šumava/Bavarian Forest Mts. has mainly addressed the latter point.

Data show that, in the 1990s, 28.4% of the total length of the Czech Republic’s watercourses were unfavourably modified, which is tens of thousands of kilometres of the river network. According to the current National Biodiversity Strategy of the Czech Republic, the country’s current optimistic targets are at least 300 km of restored watercourses for the 2016–2025 period. The status of watercourses and related floodplains has therefore not seen any significant improvement since the 1990s. Compared with biological and physical/chemical quality elements, monitoring and enhancement of the morphological status of the country’s watercourses has enjoyed a less significant position in the long term. However, apart from the “aesthetical” point of view, its improvement is also of unquestionable importance in terms of water retention in the landscape, flood protection, and drought management. It is therefore a topical issue in society.

Particularly in farmland, there are consequences of erosion and soil transportation into watercourses and further to fishponds and water reservoirs. How to correctly assess the current state of a river basin/catchment areas and of a reservoir and to identify the sources of pollution? Therefore, for proposing appropriate conservation measures both in the landscape and directly on watercourses, mathematical modelling can be successfully combined with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing and photogrammetry.
When surveying a site, archive data of aerial photography it is a good resource, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are useful, both for making overview images and for photogrammetric processing of a ortophotomaps, or of a detailed surface model

In the Czech Republic, Specially Protected Area1 management has been one of the most important tasks of the State Nature Conservancy since the 1990s. Due to improving the knowledge of species and natural habitat distribution and their development as well as increasing uncertainty caused by incomplete knowledge of impacts resulted from extensive anthropogenic land-use changes and current and predicted climate change, a traditional long-term planned blueprint management has been untenable. Therefore, the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic (NCA CR) decided to apply in practice adaptive management (AM) and to introduce necessary information and economic tools for its implementation.

When mentioning the water retention, it mostly is related to water management in the open landscape. From a long-term point of view, a lot of issues should be improved and enhanced there, but water can be very well managed also in urban agglomerations. Historically, the priority in towns and cities had been to safely and as soon as possible drain off water from there. The efforts, of course, resulted in significant interventions into watercourse beds and consequently in adjacent floodplains, thus influencing the water regime. 

Invasive alien woody plants are a significant long-term problem of protected nature. Although we have been trying to control invasive alien woody plants, e.g. the most common Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), in many Specially Protected Areas in the Czech Republic, an effective management tool has been missing yet. In practice, there are various approaches differing in their philosophy and effectiveness and very often repeating mistakes, thus making sometimes the state of the art even worse instead effectively solving the problem. In this contribution, divided into several parts, the author would like to introduce the first experience from applying new measures in controlling the Black locust and other invasive trees and shrubs in the Podyjí/Thaya River Basin National Park (South Moravia).

Europe has considerably warmed up during the past decades, which is reflected in changes in the insect fauna. The most recognizable example is an expanding distribution range of the Praying mantis (Mantis religiosa), which has occupied, starting from the south, the whole of Moravia including the Jeseníky and Beskydy Mts during the 1990s, and has arrived in Bohemia via the Svitavy region. At present it occurs not only in Central Bohemian lowlands but also in the foothills of the Krkonoše/Giant Mts. or in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. Expanding butterflies include the Large copper (Lycaena dispar), which spreads at the same rate and in the same direction as the mantis, Great banded grayling (Brinthesia circe) and the Scarce swallowtail (Iphiclides podalirius).

“Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most calamitous and fragile of all creatures is man, and at the same time the proudest. He goes installing himself in his imagination that he makes himself God´s equal, that he ascribes himself divine attributes, that he winnows himself and separate himself from the mass of other creatures, determines the share allowed the animals, his colleagues of faculties and powers as seem good to him.”

 (Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond).