Vojtěch Jarošík Award for 2023
For the tenth anniversary year of the Vojtěch Jarošík Award, students and recent graduates of Czech and Moravian universities submitted a total of 11 papers, which were published in their final form in 2023. The number of submitted papers was the same as in 2022, thus stagnating at a lower value than in previous years. However, the competition is not about the size of the peloton, but about the quality of the best ones – and these were, as usual, great.
The aggregate data on the entries in this year yielded several interesting facts. Despite the odd number of papers, we had perfect gender parity: five papers had a female and five a male as first authors, and for the last paper, they formally shared first authorship. Five universities were represented, with the papers from Prague dominating in number. Four papers came from Charles University, three from the Czech University of Agriculture, two from the University of South Bohemia and one each from two universities in Brno – Masaryk University and Mendel University. For five of the submitted papers, the student authors had shared affiliations, this time not only with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, but also with Yale University or the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
In a traditionally challenging task, the twelve evaluators of the submitted papers finally chose their three favourites, which allowed selecting three publications that reached to the top. The disciplines of these studies were diverse, with botanical, zoological and palaeolimnological topics represented.
The first place went to the study by Aleš Lisner from the Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, ‘Community biomass is driven by dominants and their characteristics-The insight from a field biodiversity experiment with realistic species loss scenario’ Published in the Journal of Ecology, a prestigious journal focused exclusively on plant ecology.
The second to third place was shared by two publications with the same number of votes. One was methodologically innovative bird-oriented paper by Vojtěch Brlík from the Department of Ecology, Faculty of Science, Charles University and the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of CAS ‘Animal tracing with sulfur isotopes: Spatial segregation and climate variability in Africa likely contribute to population trends of a migratory songbird‘ from another prestigious ecological periodical, Journal of Animal Ecology. The second was a paper by Anna Tichá from the Department of Botany of the same faculty, focusing on the long-term evolution of water character in Prášilské Lake over the Holocene, which was published in the Science of the Total Environment under the title ‘Climate-related soil saturation and peatland development may have conditioned surface water brownification at a central European lake for millennia’.
The authors of the three top-ranked papers presented their results at the Czech Society for Ecology conference, which was held in České Budějovice in September 2024.
The 11th annual Vojtěch Jarošík Award will be open to first-authored papers by students and recent graduates published in 2024. We look forward to receiving their submissions.
Vojtěch Jarošík Award for 2023: Best-ranking papers
1. Lisner A., Konečná, M., Blažek, P. & Lepš J. (2023): Community biomass is driven by dominants and their characteristics–The insight from a field biodiversity experiment with realistic species loss scenario. Journal of Ecology, 111: 240-250. doi: 10.1111/1365-2745.14029
2. – 3. Brlík V., Procházka P., Hansson B., Stricker C.A., Yohannes E., Powell R.L., Wunder M.B. (2023): Animal tracing with sulfur isotopes: Spatial segregation and climate variability in Africa likely contribute to population trends of a migratory songbird. Journal of Animal Ecology, 92, 1320–1331. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.13848
2. – 3. Tichá A., Vondrák D., Moravcová A., Chiverrell R. & Kuneš P. (2023): Climate-related soil saturation and peatland development may have conditioned surface water brownification at a central European lake for millenia. Science of the Total Environment, 858: 159982. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.159982
Other submitted publications (in alphabetical order):
Bhatta S., Shrestha B.B., Pyšek P. (2023): Invasive alien plants in South Asia: Impacts and management. NeoBiota, 88: 135–167. doi: 10.3897/neobiota.88.104118
Celina S.S., Černý J., Samy A.M. (2023): Mapping the potential distribution of the principal vector of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus Hyalomma marginatum in the Old World. PloS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 17: e0010855. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0010855
Coufal R., Hájková P., Hájek M., Jiroušek M., Polášek M., Horsáková V. & Horsák, M. (2023). Compositional variation of endangered spring fen biota reflects within-site variation in soil temperature. Plant and Soil, 485: 439–455. doi: 10.1007/s11104-022-05841-3
Gábor L., Jetz W., Zarzo‐Arias A., Winner K., Yanco S., Pinkert S., … & Moudrý V. (2023). Species distribution models affected by positional uncertainty in species occurrences can still be ecologically interpretable. Ecography, 2023(6): e06358. doi: 10.1111/ecog.06358
Kandel G.P., Bavorova M., Ullah A., Kaechele H., Pradhan P. (2023): Building resilience to climate change: examining the impact of agro‐ecological zones and social groups on sustainable development. Sustainable Development, 31: 3796-3810. doi: 10.1002/sd.2626
Laird‐Hopkins B.C., Ashe‐Jepson E., Basset Y., Arizala Cobo S., Eberhardt L., Freiberga I., … & Bladon A.J. (2023): Thermoregulatory ability and mechanism do not differ consistently between neotropical and temperate butterflies. Global Change Biology, 29: 4180-4192. doi: 10.1111/gcb.16797
Skoupá K., Bátik A., Št’astný K., Sládek Z. (2023): Structural Changes in the Skeletal Muscle of Pigs after Long-Term Administration of Testosterone, Nandrolone and a Combination of the Two. Animals, 13: 2141. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13132141
Veselská T., Švec K.,Kostovčík M., Peral-Aranega E., Garcia-Fraile P., Křížková B., Havlíček V., Saati-Santamaría Z. & Kolařík M. (2023): Proportions of taxa belonging to the gut core microbiome change throughout the life cycle and season of the bark beetle Ips typographus. FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 99: 1–15. doi: 10.1093/femsec/fiad072