EEA & Norway Grants

Community structure of

freshwater microbenthos.

CZ07 - Scholarship Programme and Bilateral Scholarship Programme;
NF-CZ07-ICP-3-193-2015; from June 2015 till May 2016.

The main aim of the project was to establish the scientific cooperation between the Charles University (Czech Republic) and the University of Oslo (Norway). Researchers and students with different abilities and experience built a team in order to collect data worth publishing.

    Context

International scientific cooperation is very important in broadening the scope of interest. Each scientific community is more or less narrowly specialized from theoretical or methodological point of view. International cooperation between research groups may give a rise of key publications that will significantly improve the knowledge in the field.

    Outputs
  • Two students from Charles University visited University in Oslo to collect samples from freshwater benthic habitats in nearby localities with the help of local scientists.
  • Project participants were sharing their knowledge about benthic communities, ecological hypotheses and statistical methods in order to prepare two joint publications.
  • The results of the project will be available as publications in the ISI-listed journals. The papers should be interesting for the basic research, as well as for the applied fields such as biomonitoring.
    Obstacles

We realized that preparation of papers for publication would need more time, because theoretical and methodological aspects need to be studied in more detail. We will stay in touch as a team to finish the publication of the two papers even after the ending of this project.

    Articles

The first joint paper "Temporal and spatial dynamics of diatom (Bacillariophyceae) communities in a peatland area" has been submitted in November 2016 to Cryptogamie, Algologie. For the preparation of the second paper, primary data have been collected from published and unpublished datasets (about 500 diatom taxa from 257 samples taken in Czech and Norwegian localities).

    Gallery

photo of a Norwegian sampling locality
photo of a Czech sampling locality
characteristic diatoms from oligo- to dystrophic localities in Northern Europe: Brachysira styriaca, Eunotia bactriana, Tetracyclus glans

    Team

Education Sector Staff: Karl Inne Ugland (Department of Biosciences, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Oslo); Jana Kulichová and Jan Šťastný (Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University)
Ph.D. Candidates: Tereza Šoljaková, Martin Pusztai, and Pavel Svoboda (Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University)

    Links
Financial support: EEA and NORWAY GRANTS
Centre for International Cooperation in Education
CHARLES UNIVERSITY /  Phycology Research Group
UNIVERSITY OF OSLO /  Section for Aquatic Biology and Toxicology
Acknowledgement: Palacký University in Olomouc, Povodí Moravy