This project investigates how 300 years of landscape change—particularly agricultural collectivization in the 20th century—have shaped grassland plant communities across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a special focus on the Austrian-Czech border. Leveraging over 100,000 historical vegetation records from the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) and digitized historical maps, the project reconstructs patterns of biodiversity and landscape structure over space and time. A key component involves resurveying over 1000 vegetation plots in the AT-CZ border region to assess changes in community composition, biodiversity loss, and habitat connectivity. This “natural experiment” setting—where formerly similar regions followed diverging political and land use paths—offers rare insights into the long-term ecological impacts of landscape transformation.
GRACE is a joint project from the Austrian FWF and Czech GACR, with co-PIs Adam T. Clark at Uni Graz and Petr Keil at CZU, Prague, and cooperation partners Franz Essl at Uni. Vienna and Hana Skokanová at VUKOZ, Brno. Collaborators for the project include the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) and its ReSurveyEurope initiative.
