International Meeting for PhD students in Botany in Poroszló

Between 22-25 September, we organized an International Meeting for PhD students in Botany in Poroszló, Hungary. This meeting was first initiated by Milan Chytry and Zoltán Botta-Dukát about twenty years ago, and it has a very nice tradition since then. Every second year, PhD students in botany meet somewhere in Central Europe and they share their research plans and results, and they can get advice from senior scientitst in a friendly atmosphere.

After a few years break do to the pandemics, finally this nice event could be organized in person. We were very happy that we could organize this event this year - Zoltán Botta-Dukát, Balázs Deák and Orsolya Valkó, from IEB CER Vácrátót.

There was a huge interest and we were almost 70 participants, from 16 countries :) The scientific program was very dense, but very interesting; the PhD students gave very impressive and high-quality presentations.

The venue of the conference was in Poroszló, in the Tisza-Lake Ecocentrum, which was a wonderful place for having such an event. During the (few) coffee breaks, we could visit the nice indoor and outdoor exhibitions and aquariums, which was a nice and refreshing activity. During the nights, there were two very interesting topical discussions about 'How can we translate the scientific results into practice?' and whether 'Quality or quantity counts more in science?', followed by a lively social program.

On Sunday, Balázs Deák led a half-day long excursion, where we showed the participants the natural beauties of the Hortobágy National Park, the alkaline grasslands and wetlands, loess grasslands, and of course, kurgans.

The event was supported by the Hungarian Ecological Society and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, we are grateful for their support. We are thankful for all the participants for their enthusiasm and active participation in all the events. We are thankful for all the colleagues from IEB who helped us in the organization, especially József Nagy, Attila Lengyel and Miklós Kertész. We are thankful for the Hortobágy National Park Directorate for supporting the field trip.

Our 'Forefront' project received funding - our new research will start soon

Our research project was one of the ten funded Forefront projects by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office in 2022. This gives us a unique opportunity for strengthening our group and for studying our beloved research topics in the next five years. The project will start soon, from 1st October :)

The title of the project is ‘Grassland restoration based on nature-based solutions in agricultural landscapes: drivers at micro- and macro-scales’. The topic of the project aligns well to the current global and European policies, that have ambitious plans for supporting habitat restoration in agricultural landscapes. The Frontline project aims to provide a comprehensive framework for utilizing nature-based solutions in the restoration of semi-natural grasslands and in creating multifunctional agricultural landscapes. The ambition is a multi-scale and multi-site research program that by answering theoretical ecological questions provides evidence-based solutions for strategic restoration planning and for fine-tuning the agri-environmental schemes. The novelty of our work is that we will combine approaches of large-scale multi-site vegetation surveys with landscape ecology, seed ecology and historical ecology. First, we use a multi-site chronosequence approach and study the spontaneous and assisted grassland recovery in agricultural landscapes. We sample the vegetation in 300 recovering sites and evaluate diversity and species composition patterns as a function of small-scale environmental heterogeneity, landscape context and recovery time. Second, we analyze the temporal (seed bank) and spatial (seed rain) components of seed dispersal and test the effect of the local and landscape factors on the availability of seed sources. Finally, we study whether seeds from the seed sources can achieve successful establishment in the aboveground vegetation and test the importance of plant functional traits, landscape- and environmental filters in the establishment process from the seed sources in the recovery process. We aim to develop and test seed-based restoration methods for overcoming establishment limitation. The research will identify optimal settings of local and landscape factors where recovery is the most promising and support restoration prioritization by determining where we can rely on spontaneous recovery processes and where we need active restoration measures.