In collaboration with Robert Tropek, we will focus on the impoverished European landscapes, such as stone quarries, open mines, spoil heaps, sandpits, or fly ash deposits, which serve as crucial secondary refuges for various species of threatened habitats. Very often such post-industrial sites harbour many endangered organisms vanishing from our common landscapes. In this context, we will combine a landscape-scale, multi-taxa field survey with laboratory experiments and field transplants to provide the first community-level inventory of the biota in fly ash lagoons, compare them with communities in nearby unpolluted sites in sandpit pools, and quantify the effects of stressors on individuals. This will enable us to unravel key stressors that shape these communities and affect their constituent species. Our case study will cover aquatic cyanobacteria, algae, macrophytes, zooplankton and aquatic macroinvertebrates.

Funding: Grant Agency of the Czech Republic