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Sustainable Development and Technologies National Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES SUBPROGRAM

Sub-project

HUN-REN Institute for Soil Sciences

The effects of different forestry treatments on decomposer soil communities and soil health


Project leader:

Flórián, Norbert

Participating researchers:

Imréné Takács, Tünde; Juhász, Péter

Preserving and increasing the naturalness of forests is primarily possible through sustainable forest management. Besides sustainable economics, to preserve the protective, ecological, and touristic functions of forests, different forestry management technologies are needed. Important claims of these technologies are to secure the increasing biodiversity, fertility, renewable capacity, and vitality of forests.

Experts of the Centre for Ecological Research and Pilis Parkerdő Ltd. in 2014 established five different treatments (preparation cutting, clear-cutting, retention tree group, and gap-cutting) in the 70-year-old oak forest stock of the Hosszú-hegy (Hungary) (Pilis Forestry Treatment). Besides that, the Pilis GAP Experiment investigates the effects of forest gaps with different shapes and sizes. In our research we investigate the effects of different forestry managements on forest soil and the diversity of decomposer communities. This research is being carried out in collaboration with two HUN-REN research centres (ÖK and TAKI).

In this project, we aim to investigate the effects of different forest management types on the communities of soil-living mesofauna and the microbiota of the rhizosphere (bacteria, symbiont fungi), especially on their genetic and functional diversity and through that on soil health. We hypothesize, that biodiversity and soil health are inversely related to the degree of disturbance.

The research contributes to the practical implementation of ecologically sustainable forest management and integrated nature conservation in line with global challenges. In the light of our results, the least environmentally damaging method of forest management can be selected in the future.

Publications

Anna Füzy, István Parádi, Bettina Kelemen, Ramóna Kovács, Imre Cseresnyés, Tibor Szili-Kovács, Tamás Árendás, Nándor Fodor, Tünde Takács Soil biological activity after a sixty-year fertilization practice in a wheat-maize crop rotation PLoS ONE (Q1), 2023
Brigitta Szabó, János Mészáros, Annamária Laborczi, Katalin Takács, Gábor Szatmári, Zsófia Bakacsi, András Makó, László Pásztor From EU-SoilHydroGrids to HU-SoilHydroGrids: A leap forward in soil hydraulic mapping Science of The Total Environment (D1), 2024
Borsodi, A.; Megyes, M.; Zsigmond, T; Horel Á. Soil bacterial communities affected by land‑use types in a small catchment area of the Balaton Uplands (Hungary) Biologia Futura (Q2) , 2024
Szabó, B., Kassai, P., Plunge, S., Nemes, A., Braun, P., Strauch, M., Witing, F., Mészáros, J., and Čerkasova, N. Addressing soil data needs and data-gaps in catchment scale environmental modelling: the European perspective SOIL (D'), 2024
Márton Dencső, Eszter Tóth, Tibor Zsigmond, Rebeka Saliga, Ágota Horel Grass cover and shallow tillage inter-row soil cultivation affecting CO2 and N2O emissions in a sloping vineyard in upland Balaton, Hungary Geoderma Regional (Q1), 2024