Grassland restoration in a former military training area: fifth year of our field study

Former military areas - due to their relatively undisturbed status - often provide unique opportunities for biodiversity conservation. That is why we started our monitoring study in 2018 in a former military area in Hortobágy National Park. This is a very unique and interesting place, where in a large-scale restoration project, the National Park cleared the unexploded ordnances and levelled the soil surface of the former bomb craters on approximately 4000 hectares. This provided a very nice opportunity for us to study the spontaneous vegetation development on vast bare soil surfaces.

This year we had the fifth year of monitoring. It was very nice to see that the recovery process is nicely progressing, the weeds are declining and the cover of target species is increasing year by year.

Spontaneously recovering vegetation three years after the soil levelling.

Field survey in 2020.

Field survey in 2022.

Kurgan survey in the Hortobágy National Park

This week we further continued our kurgan survey, one of our favourite research topic. We headed to the Hortobágy and Nagykunság regions of the Hortobágy National Park. More details about our kurgan-related researches and publications can be found here.

We could approach the Eperjes mound through a 'sea' of Artemisia pontica.

The Vadas-mound is surrounded by croplands but still holds a nice, species-rich loess grassland vegetation with Silene viscosa and Salvia austriaca.

Nagy-Purgány mound: a classical example of a kurgan embedded in croplands.

This mound has been abandoned from agricultural cultivation recently. Its Hungarian name (Jaj-halom) can be translated as 'Ouch'-mound - this describes well the feeling as the vegetation is full of thistles and bromes.

Cumanian memorial place on the Kis Hegyesbori mound near Karcag.