On Monday, 15 June 2026, six recent graduates of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague received the Minister of Agriculture Award. The award is presented annually to the best student from each faculty for a master’s thesis with an exceptional contribution to practice in the fields of agriculture, forestry, food production and rural development. The award also includes a financial prize determined by the Ministry. The award ceremony traditionally takes place during the summer graduation ceremonies of the individual faculties.
Tereza Pelcmanová, a graduate of the Faculty of Economics and Management, received the award for her master’s thesis on evaluating the performance of companies in the dairy industry, an important part of the agri-food sector. The author developed a high-quality theoretical framework grounded in relevant academic sources and subsequently applied it in her own analysis.
A master’s thesis focused on assessing plants’ ability to use the soil and endophytic microbiome for protection against diseases caused by pathogenic fungi brought success to Erika Gallová from the Faculty of Agrobiology, Food and Natural Resources. The topic opens up new approaches to crop protection while also building on the continually developing applications of beneficial microorganisms in soil.
The Faculty of Engineering is represented among the award winners by Oleg Touš, whose thesis focused on evaluating the usability of radar (SAR) and optical satellite imagery for precision management of kiwi production in the Bay of Plenty region in New Zealand. The thesis aimed to assess the temporal dynamics of the NDVI and NDRE vegetation indices from the Sentinel-2 mission, as well as the RVI radar indicators and VV/VH ratio from the Sentinel-1 mission, in relation to the phenological development of the crop and its spatial heterogeneity. The topic is highly relevant given the growing demand for digitalization in crop production. The contribution of the thesis lies in linking theoretical interpretation with practical implementation in a non-standard crop stand: kiwi orchards trained on a specific support structure, which affects the resulting signals and information flows obtained from satellite analysis.
Matyáš Rjabi, a graduate of the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, focused on the health condition of European beech and its response to infestation by gall-forming insects. European beech is one of the key tree species in Central European forests, and in the context of climate change, drought and the overall weakening of forest stands, assessing its vitality is becoming increasingly important. The thesis, therefore, focuses on a species that is not always considered a major economic pest, but can serve as a very good indicator of changes in leaf physiology and the sensitivity of beech stands to biotic stress.
The long-term use of composted sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants for the reclamation of soils degraded by coal mining is the topic of Tabea Leonia Kottek´s master´s thesis from the Faculty of Environmental Sciences. Its uniqueness lies in long-term monitoring from 2021 to 2025, which assesses not only changes in soil properties but also the mobility of metalloids and their uptake by plants more than four years after sludge application. The increasing production of sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants and the need to restore extensive post-mining areas create an opportunity to seek sustainable solutions. The thesis evaluated the suitability of composted sludge as a soil improver on brownfields in the Ústí nad Labem region. Changes in soil properties, metalloid mobility using standardized leaching tests, and the uptake of elements by the dominant species, tansy (Tanacetum vulgare), were monitored on experimental plots.
Another laureate of the Ministry of Agriculture Award, Martina Sihelská, completed her studies at the Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences. Her master’s thesis represents an exceptionally valuable contribution to knowledge of the biology and ethology of the critically endangered wild camel (Camelus ferus), a species for which only limited information on behaviour and social organization is currently available. The student conducted demanding field research in Mongolia, during which she obtained a unique dataset. She then processed it using appropriate analytical methods and interpreted it in the context of current scientific knowledge. Among the most valuable outputs is the first field documentation of birth and early maternal care in this species, which has already been published in the internationally impacted journal Acta Ethologica. Read the interview with Martina Sihelská HERE.
