Sowing grass seed.
Photo: László Lontay

Grazing by Hungarian grey cattle.
Photo: Szabi Lengyel

Fire management in reedbeds.
Photo: Eszter Déri

In cooperation with experts from Hortobágy National Park, we designed and coordinated the implementation of the Egyek-Pusztakócs LIFE-Nature project, a landscape-scale habitat restoration and management programme, funded by 1.040 million Euro from the LIFE-Nature financial instrument of the European Union between 2004 and 2008.

The project was implemented as the second phase of one of the largest (> 4000 ha) and oldest (1976-) habitat restoration projects in Hungary and Europe. We started the restoration of two grassland habitat types of Natura 2000 priority on 760 ha, extended grazing to >2000 ha native and restored grasslands, increased the diversity of marshes by fire management and grazing on 400 ha and cultivated 150 ha croplands extensively (chemical-free). A general description of the project and its main results is available in the booklet Grassland restoration and marsh protection in Egyek-Pusztakócs (pdf, 10 MB).

In a project funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund and the Norway Financing Mechanism, we follow up on the impacts of restoration and management implemented in the Egyek-Pusztakócs LIFE-Nature project as a large-scale ecological experiment. We are specifically interested in how plant and animal communities assemble and how landscape-scale biodiversity patterns emerge after restoration, and how these patterns can be influenced by follow-up adaptive management.

Our first results show that the restoration of grasslands using two low-diversity seed mixtures was surprisingly quick. As early as Year 2 following restoration, plant assemblages rich in target native grasses and poor in weeds or dicotyledonous species have formed. For more details, please see our article entitled Restoring grassland biodiversity: Sowing low-diversity seed mixtures can lead to rapid favourable changes. This was quickly followed by arthropod species because a number of species characteristic to the target native grasslands have colonized the restored grasslands by Year 2. For more details, please read our article Measuring the short-term success of grassland restoration: The use of habitat affinity indices in ecological restoration.