ABSTRACT
Post-mining Sites Alena Roubíčková,1,* Ondřej Mudrák2 and Jan Frouz1,3
Studying succession in ecosystems is of vast theoretical and practical importance (Odum 1969, Luken 1990, Frouz et al. 2001, Prach and Pišek 2001). Most succession studies are focused on plants. Plants are considered to be the most important ecosystem component because they form the bottom of the trophic cascade and strongly affect the physical arrangement of habitats for other organisms including soil invertebrates (Dunger 1968, 1991, Frouz 1997, Pižl 2001). Plant succession is driven mainly by abiotic conditions of the environment, the species pool and interspecifi c competition or facilitation (Odum 1969, Glenn-Lewin et al. 1992, van Andel et al. 1993), but other trophic levels can affect succession as well. Many studies have reported about the infl uence of herbivores on plant succession (Brown et al. 1987, Brown and Gange 1989a, b, 1992, Bach 1994, Fagan and Bishop 2000). Less is known about the effect of belowground herbivors and other soil fauna even though they can have a substantial effect on plant succession (De Deyn et al. 2003). Soil fauna can affect plants via trophic and non-trophic
1Institute for Environmental Studies, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Benátská 2, 128 00, Prague 2, Czech Republic. 2Institute of Botany AS CR, Dukelská 135, Třeboň, CZ-379 82, Czech Republic. 3Institute of Soil Biology, Biology Centre AS CR, Na Sádkách 7, 370 05, České Budějovice, Czech Republic. Email: frouz@upb.cas.cz *Corresponding author
interactions or via infl uencing the microbial soil community and physical or chemical properties of the soil (Anderson 1988).
