Success Stories
“I hope to restore my own piece of nature,” says plant ecologist Milan Chytrý
Milan Chytrý has been teaching at the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University for more than thirty years. His pedagogical work was recognized on 4 November 2025, when the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Mikuláš Bek, awarded him a prize for outstanding educational activity at a higher-education institution. In 2025, Chytrý was also elected a member of Academia Europaea, a prestigious scientific society that supports international excellence in science and education. In the interview, he describes, among other things, his approach to teaching, his research into plant diversity, and current changes in Czech and European nature.
prof. RNDr. Milan Chytrý, Ph.D.
Head of the Vegetation Research Group, Department of Botany and Zoology
Milan Chytrý studied Systematic Biology and Ecology at the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University. In 2009, he was appointed professor in the field of Botany. He leads the Vegetation Science Group, and his research focuses on the ecology of plant communities, macroecology, biogeography, and changes in vegetation across space and time. He has long been involved in international biodiversity research and is the coordinator of the European Vegetation Archive database.
What does teaching mean to you?
I started teaching as a doctoral student thirty-four years ago, and I still enjoy it. If I conducted research without contact with students, the satisfaction from my work would probably be only half as great. When I look back onmore than three decades of my work at the Faculty of Science, I can take pleasure not only in the scientific results, which in various ways have influenced the development of our field, but also in my former students—many of whom are now respected scientific figures both nationally and internationally, while others are important in Czech nature conservation or excellent teachers and educators.
Students appreciate, among other things, that in your teaching you emphasize which information is truly essential. Why do you think this is important?
Today we are surrounded by an enormous amount of information, and it is not easy to navigate it. Some information is important, others less so, or important mainly for someone else. A teacher should guide students through this sea of facts and show them what is important for their field and future work, and what deserves greater attention. There is a difference between letting students study something only from textbooks or the internet and distinguishing essential information from less important details during a lecture. Exams often reveal who attended the lectures and who did not and studied on their own.
You also check whether students have understood the material by using quizzes at the beginning of classes.
I hesitated about introducing these quizzes. University students are adults who should have the freedom to organize their time. Some prefer continuous study throughout the semester and then less intensive preparation before the exam. Others prefer more free time during the semester and intensive study during the exam period. I personally do not like it when someone organizes my time for me, but over time I found that many students appreciate it when a teacher sets deadlines. These motivate them to do work they would otherwise postpone. Therefore, at the beginning of each lecture, I offer students a short online test on the material from the previous lecture. Importantly, this test is optional. If someone skips it or does not do well, nothing happens. However, for a good result in the test, students can earn a point that I add to their exam result. Many students appreciate this system as good motivation for continuous study. And for me it is useful feedback: from the answers I can see which part of the material students did not understand well. I then think about how to explain that material better.
How do you approach providing feedback to students?
If a student is doing something incorrectly, we have to tell them and guide them toward the correct approach. This is our duty as teachers and at the same time a method of teaching, because, as is well known, people learn best from their own mistakes. From a psychological perspective, however, it is important how such criticism is communicated. The key is to focus on the work that is being evaluated, not on the person, and to discuss matters factually, without any hints of negative emotions. We should never criticize someone as a person or even generalize that if a student made one specific mistake, they will also make mistakes in other things. It often helps when I recall my own beginnings and tell students that I made the same mistake too, and how I came to realize that it was wrong.
It is also necessary to tell the student whether the issue is a substantial, factual error or rather a minor formal detail. We sometimes encounter situations where an evaluator places disproportionate emphasis on minor terminological or stylistic inaccuracies without making the effort to understand the content and meaning of the assessed work more deeply. Such superficial evaluation is often counterproductive. It either fails to reveal the fundamental problems of the work (if they exist), or it unfairly devalues a large amount of high-quality work by criticizing a few relatively insignificant errors. The assessment of student work must be balanced—it should not focus only on mistakes and problems, but should also highlight and appreciate the high-quality aspects of the work and its intellectual, methodological, or time demands.
FIELDWORK IS A JOY FOR EVERYONE
You have been leading botanical field excursions abroad since 1996, and since 2020 the Geobotanical Project—one of the elective courses. What is its main benefit for students?
The aim is for students, using a specific research project as an example, to go through the entire process of team-based scientific research in our field—from a literature review of the topic and planning of fieldwork, through the collection of botanical and ecological data in the field, the processing of the collected material and statistical analysis of the data, to writing a scientific paper and its publication. The course is non-compulsory, because it is designed for highly motivated students who want to do more than is required by the standard study plans. Before the enrolment, I tell the students that my colleague and myself organize this course because we enjoy research, we devote a great deal of our free time to it, and we expect the same from students who become involved in the Geobotanical Project.
When analyzing the collected data, we discuss the most appropriate concepts and procedures in a group. If a student proposes a better solution than the one I had considered, we use their proposal. It does not matter who came up with the idea. Every idea counts, and we should choose the best one so that the resulting publication is of the highest possible quality. The paper that we then publish in the international scientific literature is often the first scholarly publication for bachelor’s or master’s students.
How many papers have resulted from the Geobotanical Project?
So far we have published two, a third is under review, and a fourth is in preparation. We began in 2020 with a project focused on the vegetation and flora of South Moravian grassland on saline soils. It was the year of COVID, when teaching took place exclusively online. Students were isolated, and we teachers were as well, so we greatly enjoyed working together in the field. We moved the fieldwork to the middle of the summer holidays, when the risk of infection was low. We processed the collected materials during the autumn semester, again in isolation, but we coordinated the work through regular online meetings. We published an extensive synthesis paper on flora and vegetation of saline habitats in 2022.
A year later, we studied changes in vegetation of the Hrubý Jeseník Mountains. For the paper summarizing the results of this research, a group of our students received the Dean’s Award of the Faculty of Science at Masaryk University. It was absolutely deserved, because they devoted a great deal of time and effort to this work beyond their regular study obligations.
Have you also worked abroad?
After COVID, we began working on the Balkan Peninsula, in Montenegro. This country is botanically very poorly studied, mainly because there are very few local experts. The last complete checklist of plant species in Montenegro was published by the Czech botanist Josef Rohlena in 1941–1942. Yet the botanical diversity of this country is enormous, and new species are still being discovered there.
For both students and us teachers, it was something exotic. We had to learn many new plant species that grow there but do not occur in our country. Gradually, however, experience accumulated. We have been to the Balkans four times now with a gradually changing group of students, most recently even outside the original scope of the Geobotanical Project.
What can be the most challenging part of such research for students?
Fieldwork is usually a joy for everyone, although in the Balkans, it was sometimes quite demanding. In July, temperatures over several days reached almost forty degrees Celsius. Walking uphill and working intensively in this weather for several days in a row was quite exhausting.
A lot of time is also taken up by plant identification. We always brought back many herbarium specimens from the field and had to work with identification literature. In the Balkans, this literature is incomplete and is often written in local languages, so translation is also necessary.
I HOPE TO RESTORE MY OWN PIECE OF NATURE
Among other things, you have long served as secretary of the European Vegetation Survey working group. What role does international cooperation play in research?
A very significant one. The European Vegetation Survey is an international working group that brings together vegetation ecologists who study the diversity of plant communities and habitats in Europe. Together with other researchers, we are building a European database of vegetation data called EVA – the European Vegetation Archive. This database is coordinated by our Vegetation Science Group at the Department of Botany and Zoology. We founded this database in 2012, and it currently contains more than two million records. Each record is a complete list of all plant species found on a plot of several square metres, along with basic environmental data from the surveyed site.
So large vegetation database had never existed before, either in Europe or anywhere else in the world. That is why the European Environment Agency selected us to prepare a revision of the EUNIS system for the classification of European habitats. This was a very important task, because habitats form the basis of nature conservation in Europe. Their occurrence is used to designate protected areas within the Natura 2000 network and to assess changes in European nature over time.
At the beginning, the EUNIS classification contained only a list of habitats, but lacked further information about them. Using our databases, we gradually characterized these habitats in terms of plant species composition and distribution. If we identified inconsistencies in the originally proposed classification, we suggested alternative solutions. It took several years, but everything is now complete. Without international cooperation, this would not have been possible. Through this and other analyses, we have raised international awareness of the importance of vegetation databases for research and practical applications. Consequently, international students and postdoctoral researchers often come to our group for research stays.
You also devote a great deal of attention to international students and postdoctoral researchers.
Yes, every semester our research group hosts several visiting international students at all levels, from bachelor’s to doctoral, as well as postdoctoral researchers. They come to learn how to work with vegetation data, and some of them directly use data from the European Vegetation Archive. We explain how the data are structured and what they include. They then work with them and build their projects on this basis. We also help them define the concept of their research so that it contributes as effectively as possible to addressing current scientific questions.
Among today’s young ecologists, there are many people who have an excellent command of modern data-analysis methods. They are able to process enormous datasets and carry out impressive analyses that I would not even have dreamed of twenty years ago. The problem is that existing data come from different sources, and their quality may vary from one source to another. Sometimes differences between neighbouring countries are caused by slightly different fieldwork methodologies that are traditionally used there. If your analysis detects a difference between such countries and you are unaware of these methodological differences, you might interpret it as a real difference in floristic diversity. Thanks to our long-term work experience with these data, we know the potential pitfalls of using them. Anyone who does not know the data well can easily misinterpret analytical results. That is why we work closely with data analysts and devote considerable effort to distinguishing, in the results of analyses, biases caused by differing methodologies from genuine differences in the diversity of flora and vegetation.
For a long time, we worked on the classification and characterization of Czech and European habitats and vegetation types. However, habitats and their biodiversity change over time, mainly as a result of human activity and human-induced global environmental change. Therefore, we now focus our research on assessing these changes. To this end, our research group recently established another database called ReSurveyEurope. In it, we collect data on changes in the floristic composition of vegetation at specific sites. We also use historical records from our databases: we revisit locations where the floristic composition of vegetation was recorded several years or decades ago and record it again using the same methodology. This allows us to see what has changed. And that is what conservationists are interested in: trends of change. To mitigate negative trends, they need to know whether, where, and how fast changes are occurring, and which factors are causing them.
We currently have an international project with partners from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Finland, in which we analyse changes in habitats and vegetation at a European scale using the ReSurveyEurope database. It is an excellent team of leading European experts on the biodiversity of vegetation and habitats and on assessing their changes. Just as we prepared fundamental synthetic studies on the diversity of European vegetation and habitats a few years ago, we are now preparing similarly fundamental studies on their changes over time.
You also lead a project on European hotspots of local diversity in plant communities. What is the aim of this project?
I have always been fascinated by extremely species-rich plant communities. For example, on some meadows in the White Carpathians in southeastern Moravia, a botanist can record more than 100 plant species on an area of just 16 m². Fifteen years ago, we provided these data to an international team of plant ecologists who, based on a global comparison, found that these were the highest numbers of species ever recorded on plots of this size. I am interested in why so many species naturally occur together in some places. In the current project, we are also investigating whether comparable levels of diversity occur elsewhere in Europe outside the Carpathian region.
During research carried out as part of the Geobotanical Project in Montenegro, we discovered that in some areas, there is also enormous plant-species diversity on very small plots. Last June, we examined these areas in more detail within an international team of professional botanists and graduates of the Geobotanical Project who have since progressed to doctoral study. We were interested in how farmers manage these sites today, how they managed them in the past, and whether the type and intensity of land management influence plant species diversity.
What factors can influence plant diversity?
There are several such factors. First and foremost are climate and soil. If the climate is too cold or too dry, plant diversity tends to be lower. Soil acidity—i.e. a low pH of the soil solution—also usually reduces the number of plant species that can occur on such soil. Small numbers of species are also found in places excessively enriched with nitrogen or phosphorus.
Another factor is landscape structure and its historical development. Landscapes with a diverse mosaic of forests and meadows or pastures are usually species-rich, because different species survive in different habitats. If a landscape becomes largely afforested or, conversely, deforested, the number of species declines. These factors are also reflected historically. If land cover changed in the recent past—for example, when a forested landscape was deforested—the number of species is usually lower.
A significant factor is agricultural management. Traditional, low-intensity farming generally increases plant diversity. However, if farming is too intensive, as in much of the current agricultural landscape of Central Europe, plant diversity is not high. Diversity is also reduced by the opposite process, namely the abandonment of agricultural land in places where farming ceases to be economically viable. Such land becomes overgrown with forest or shrubs, and only those plant species that tolerate shade remain.
However, landscapes with low-intensity management are rapidly disappearing in Europe. Some parts of Montenegro are among the last places where traditional farming systems with forest grazing and seasonal driving of livestock to mountain pastures still survive. This year we collaborated with a Serbian ethnologist who gathered information from local residents about farming practices in the selected locality—information that we would otherwise not have been able to obtain.
You also addressed changes in biodiversity in your lecture after being elected to Academia Europaea. How do these changes manifest themselves?
It is becoming clear that a relatively small group of plant species is spreading within European vegetation. These species tend to become increasingly abundant in many places. In contrast, rarer or ecologically specialized species that create differences between individual sites and habitats are disappearing. Nature is thus gradually becoming homogenized.
Nitrogen compounds from atmospheric deposition are also deposited in ecosystems in large amounts, enriching soils with nutrients. As a result, nutrient-demanding species spread. They are able to produce large amounts of biomass and shade out other species, which then disappear.
Wet habitats are gradually drying out due to global warming and increased evaporation. Conversely, habitats that used to be dry are producing more biomass, vegetation is becoming denser, and species that require shade and are not adapted to dry conditions are spreading. This, too, leads to homogenization. Unfortunately, Europe’s landscape is not developing well in terms of biological diversity.
How could this negative trend be reversed?
In nature reserves, conservation management is carried out, such as mowing or grazing of grasslands. In recent studies conducted by my master’s and doctoral students, we compared changes in vegetation in South Moravian nature reserves and outside them. Unfortunately, it turned out that negative trends are evident not only in the general landscape but also in nature reserves. The only difference is that changes occur more slowly in reserves. This means that conservation management slows negative trends but doesn’t completely reverse them.
The solution is difficult, because the changes are largely caused by global factors: nitrogen deposition, climate warming associated with soil drying, and others. However, this does not mean that conservation management should not be carried out. Of course it helps, and in many cases it has improved the situation. What I have mentioned are average trends, but there are examples where conditions have genuinely improved.
Recently, there has been a strong effort to restore natural habitats to places where they existed in the past but disappeared due to human activity. In this spirit, the European Union recently adopted the Nature Restoration Regulation. According to this regulation, it is not enough merely to protect the last remnants of nature; it is also important to restore natural habitats where they once existed but have been lost.
Is there any way individuals can contribute to protecting diversity?
Certainly. For example, one can start in their own garden by reducing the areas where the lawn is cut short several times a year and instead setting aside areas that are mown only once or twice. This allows naturally occurring meadow species to flower and provide food for insect pollinators.
I have such a hobby project of my own. In the village where we have a weekend house, there is a municipal areaunder a power line that has to be mown regularly. Plant diversity in this lawn is low because it was established on former arable land.
In neighbouring villages, there are protected areas with species-rich steppe grasslands that need to be mown every year as part of conservation management to prevent them from becoming overgrown with tall grass or shrubs. This produces hay that is usually unwanted and is therefore often burned. Along with the hay, many seeds of rare plant species are burned as well.
So I agreed with the mayor that we could try to increase the species richness of this lawn by spreading hay from nearby reserves onto it. The municipality prepared the plot for sowing, and colleagues from the Czech Society for Ornithology, who manage the surrounding nature reserves, provided me with the cut plant material. In this way, seeds of locally native plant species that belong to this landscape were introduced into the lawn in my village. Now we will see how it turns out. I hope I will succeed in restoring my own piece of nature.
If more people were to do such a simple thing in their surroundings—something that requires almost no financial cost—it would be an easy way to gradually bring nature back into the landscape.
Interview author: Adéla Lerchová