We have just launched a new research project that has recently been funded by the National Research, Development
and Innovation Office of Hungary. The funding scheme supports research
groups with internationally outstanding results and gives recognition to
those, who published a highly cited paper in the recent years.
The list of the funded projects can be found here.
This new project is a great opportunity for the continuation of our researches about
grassland fragments on ancient burial mounds. Please find below the
short summary of the project, and come back to our site for updates
about the results.
Project title: The role of habitat and landscape factors in grassland community assembly
Principal investigator: Balázs Deák
Summary
In
the intensively used landscapes of Europe remnants of the natural
vegetation often persist in small habitat islands which have an
outstanding conservational importance. Grassland habitat islands of
transformed landscapes are proper objects for exploring mechanisms that
drive species composition and functional diversity of isolated grassland
communities. In our former papers we studied the effects of landscape
and habitat level drivers on the populations and metapopulations of
grassland specialist and generalist plant species. In our present study,
based on the findings of our former researches, we aim at revealing the
drivers of functional diversity of plant and animal communities living
in isolated grasslands. For the research we use isolated grasslands
located on ancient burial mounds called ‘kurgans’. In our first study we
reveal the effects of landscape and habitat level drivers on the
functional diversity of plant and animal communities of habitat islands
for which we use a geographically widely distributed multisite dataset
and several taxa. We also study the role of dispersal syndromes in the
maintenance of metapopulations dynamics of grassland species. In our
second study we reveal the effects of historical land use changes, and
changes in the composition and structure of the landscape on the
functional diversity of plant and animal communities of habitat islands.
We study the effects of recent land use changes (abandonment) on the
habitat properties of habitat islands and test how do changes in habitat
properties affect the regeneration of grassland communities.
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| Species-rich dry grassland fragment on an ancient burial mound in Hungary. |
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