Join us for an interdisciplinary workshop focused on the pressing issue of plastics in riverine and freshwater systems. The program includes expert presentations from diverse research fields, a guided laboratory visit, and a field trip offering hands-on insights into practical monitoring and assessment techniques.
Date: October 29–31, 2025
Host: Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
More information:bme.hu
The latest review article by researchers of the Institute for Soil Sciences provides an overview of the role of soil in climate change mitigation and highlights the potential of agricultural practices to support these goals. It provides insights into agrotechnical systems that increase soil carbon sequestration and reduce soil carbon emissions. After a brief global overview, the article will show how the organic carbon stocks of Hungarian agricultural land have changed over the past decades, focusing on climate-smart agricultural techniques (cover crops, conservation tillage, fertilisation, crop rotation, regenerative agriculture, and agroforestry) and their impacts. The article provides insights into the fact that the effectiveness and feasibility of these climate-smart agricultural practices are highly dependent on the geographical location, climate and soil conditions of the growing area, and the applicability and limitations of each practice under Hungarian conditions. In addition, it summarises the trends over time in the adoption of specific climate-smart practices over the last decade or two. Finally, it discusses the challenges to the adoption of the practices presented from economic, political, regulatory, and managerial perspectives.
The article is published in Land, available at the link below: mdpi.com
In an international team led by Valentin Klaus researchers of the ‘Sustainable Cities’ subproject at HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research have recently published a comment paper in npj Urban Sustainability about the potential of the EU Nature Restoration Law in making our cities more resilient, biodiverse and liveable.
The European Union’s Nature Restoration Law is a great opportunity and a much needed step in tackling climate change and protecting biodiversity in Europe. Cities make up over 20% of EU land, and restoring urban ecosystems is a great opportunity to make cities greener, healthier, and more sustainable. But right now, the law mostly measures how much green space a city has, not how good that space is for nature. In fact, cities with already high green space may not be required to do much more under the law.
Many city green spaces look nice, but they often lack the variety of native plant and animal species, and those natural features that support a healthy environment. Poor design and pollution can limit their benefits to people, i.e., the ecosystem services provided. This matters because urban nature is crucial – not just for wildlife, but for people’s health, well-being, and protection from heatwaves and floods.
Therefore, the researchers highlight that European cities need even more ambitious nature restoration targets. Urban green spaces must be ecologically rich and diverse, not just large or leafy. That means planting native species, protecting rare habitats, avoiding too much mowing or paving, and adding features like dead wood or ponds to support insects and birds.
Biodiverse and aestethically appealing tallgrass meadow in an urban park in Gödöllő, Hungary
To help make this happen, the study authors propose nine key actions:
Cities have a unique chance to help solve the biodiversity crisis. Unlike farmland or forests, city spaces don’t usually compete with agriculture or timber production. Restoring nature in cities can bring big rewards – from better mental health to cleaner air and even economic benefits like tourism and reduced healthcare costs.
In the comment paper, researchers call on EU countries to use the momentum of the new law to do more – not just create green-looking spaces, but to restore truly biodiverse and resilient urban ecosystems. That’s how we can make our cities better for nature and people.
Good practices in public greenspaces can inspire people to introduce nature into their gardens
This research was conducted within the framework of the Sustainable Development and Technologies, National Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at an international test site, aiming to address groundwater contamination and associated health risks in the Shendi area, Sudan, within the Nubian Aquifer System.
The study revealed that nitrate and fluoride are the primary contaminants contributing to health risks, particularly affecting children. Fluoride concentrations were primarily linked to natural geological sources, while nitrate pollution was largely attributed to agricultural runoff. Nitrite and ammonia contamination reflected a mix of wastewater and farming activities. Probabilistic health risk simulations confirmed that children are significantly more vulnerable than adults due to lower body weight and longer exposure time.
Based on these findings, the study recommends the implementation of water treatment technologies, alongside stricter regulation of agricultural and wastewater discharges to reduce contaminant input. It also emphasizes the need for public health awareness campaigns to inform communities about the risks of untreated groundwater. Furthermore, establishing routine groundwater monitoring is essential for identifying contamination hotspots and supporting timely, evidence-based interventions. These actions are critical to ensuring safe water access and protecting public health in arid and semi-arid regions.
Go to the article: sciencedirect.com
A recent countrywide citizen science project called MyPond launched by researchers from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary highlights the potential of garden ponds as crucial contributors to urban biodiversity. The online survey gathered data from over 800 garden pond owners, uncovering insights into how these small water bodies support various animals, including amphibians and their tadpoles, odonates, and birds. The study also examined the impact of pond features, pond management practices, and urbanisation on the occurrence of these animals, shedding light on the role of pond management for wildlife.
More information: ecolres.hu
Ornamental garden ponds support the survival of numerous protected species, especially if they are not overcrowded with exotic fish. A study conducted by researchers from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research (HUN-REN CER) with public participation and published in Urban Ecosystems, also shows that Hungarian garden ponds are among the larger ones in Europe.
Discover the recent research within the Sustainable Development and Technologies project, where we conducted a multi-step modeling approach integrating unsupervised and deep learning algorithms to improve the interpretation of geophysical well-logging data for a more thorough characterization of the Quaternary aquifer system in the Debrecen area, Hungary. This approach facilitated the mapping of lithofacies and variations in hydraulic conductivity across the primary hydrostratigraphical units. Through this integration, we enhanced the understanding of the groundwater system, providing reliable inputs for groundwater modeling in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner.
In the framework of the Sustainable Development and Technologies project, this research focuses on employing an unsupervised learning approach to interpret well-log data, aiming to characterize the primary hydrostratigraphical units within the Quaternary aquifer system in the Debrecen area of Eastern Hungary. The study introduced a novel approach that bridges the traditional and data-driven machine learning approaches, which proved to be beneficial in characterizing heterogeneous aquifer systems, thereby facilitating successful groundwater resource development and management.
Half of the applied fertilizers are not used globally and instead pollute the environment. Determining the degree of loss, which is crucial for prevention, is accomplished using models validated by measurements. For validation, knowledge of the concentration (χa) measured above the crop with the photoacoustic method is essential. In this regard, a summary article was published in which we described the models applicable to fertilized fields. We model material flux in the soil-plant-atmosphere system – specifically, the bi-directional exchange of ammonia – using an electrotechnical analogy. The ammonia flux (F), or current, is determined by the ratio of the concentration difference (Δχ) between two media and the resistance to exchange (R). The article discusses in detail the model concepts and the parameterizations of concentrations and resistances. Ammonia emitted by the soil is either directly released into the atmosphere (red line) or partly taken up by vegetation, i.e. recycled (purple line). The aim of our study is not only to measure and model ammonia loss, but also to determine rate of recycling.
We present a new alternative for the joint inversion of well logs to predict the volumetric and zone parameters in reservoir rocks. Porosity, water saturation, shale content, kerogen and matrix volumes are simultaneously estimated with the tool response function constants with a hyperparameter estimation assisted inversion of open-hole well logs. We treat the zone parameters, i.e., the physical properties of rock matrix constituents, shale, kerogen, and pore-fluids, as well as some textural parameters, as hyperparameters and estimate them using genetic algorithm for the entire processing interval. The significance of the inversion method is in that zone parameters are extracted directly from wireline logs, which both improves the solution of the forward problem and reduces the cost of core sampling and laboratory measurements. In a field study, we demonstrate the feasibility of the inversion method using real well logs collected from a Miocene formation situated in the Pannonian Basin, East Hungary.