Department of Landscape and Restoration Ecology

Major research domain of the department is the ecological effects of land-use change and climate change. Research activities include the description of ongoing processes in the landscape, experimentation on vegetation dynamics and restoration, modelling land-use and vegetation, as well as the assessment of ecosystem services and their dynamics. Topics cover basic and applied research that contributes to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecological integrity of ecosystems.

Current activities focus primarily but not exclusively on the sand region of Kiskunság in the Danube-Tisza Interfluve in central Hungary. This cultural landscape that still carries unique natural values are heavily affected by ongoing environmental and socio-economic changes, thus being an ideal target region to assess the issues highlighted above. The department is coordinating the Kiskun LTER (long-term ecological research) programme, as part of the International and European LTER network.

Landscape scale is of primary importance: this is the scale at which alternative land-use options coexist and potentially replace each other, as well as the scale of human perception and traditional use. Socio-economic processes can already be interpreted and thus linked to ecological ones at this scale.

In European cultural landscapes, conservation, sustainable use, and restoration need to be combined in land management in order to maintain ecological integrity and ecosystem service provision, thus research also need to cover these topics. We also aim at assessing emerging ecological problems in the region and the country. Strengthening the transdisciplinary and international collaboration, as well as transferring the ecological knowledge to policy-makers and the society are crucially important.


Staff:
Kröel-Dulay, György, Head of the Department

Csecserits, Anikó
Halassy, Melinda
Kertész, Miklós
Kovács-Láng, Edit
Lellei-Kovács, Eszter
Lhotsky, Barbara
Mojzes, Andrea
Ónodi, Gábor
Rédei, Tamás
Somay, László
Szitár, Katalin
Török, Katalin

News and Events