News

The newest paper from the BIODESERT ERC project of Prof. Fernando Maestre has been published in Science. The paper gives an overview on the effects of grazing on the ecosystem service delivery in global drylands. The study is based on the implementation of a robust field protocol in dry rangelands of six continents and 26 countries. It was our...

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...

The research project of Orsolya Valkó was one of the ten funded Forefront projects by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office in 2022. The research funding will enable us to carry out research about our beloved topic in the next five years and it offers a unique opportunity for strengthening our group.

After three years, it was a real pleasure to finally attend conferences in person and to meet with colleagues who we haven't met for a long time. The last part of August was especially intensive and exciting as we attended/will attend in total four conferences :) And now we are very much looking forward to the two forthcoming conferences in...

Early in this year we started emailing with researchers of the Samarkand State University, and we started to plan together a research project about the restoration possibilities of overgrazed and degraded sandy steppes and semi-deserts. After meeting in the virtual space the next step was even nicer: in July we spent ten days in Uzbekistan, visited...

Our research group takes part again in the 'Garden in the Cube' program series of the Centre for Ecological Research. In 23 July we present the beauties of seed ecology in the program called 'Urban legends - Interactive scientific adventures'. The core topic of this program is urbanisation, where the visitors can gain experiences on seed...

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...

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.

This year we continue our large sampling campaign of the kurgans in the Great Hungarian Plain. Kurgans are ancient burial mounds built by nomadic steppic tribes millenia ago, and still harbour dry grasslands in the heavily transformed agricultural landscapes. You can read more about these iconic landmarks in our earlier publications.

Our new paper about the impressive ecosystem engineering effect of a large bird has recently been published.