Eszter S.-Falusi

ABSTRACT The natural relations of Sokoró Region are ideal for a sustainable region: the hills are thickly covered with quaternary loess, the luvisol is a perfect base for forestry and agriculture. The only barrier of development is erosion. More than 60% of the land is used as agriculture fields and vineyards. Due to antropogen effects the hills and the valleys are strongly hurted by erosion. While at some places complete hillsides are becoming barren, the lowlands are covered with silt. The active farmers were educated in the time of co-operatives, so the big fields, wheat-corn based plant structures are dominating, the land-use structure is quite outworn. The Rural Development Centre of the small region together with UNESCO experts initiated a complex program to moderate erosion and to reflate extensive farming on the hillsides. With the new Biosphere Zone System (core-buffer-transition) it is much more easier to synchronize the different interests of nature protection, agriculture and tourism.

ABSTRACT Soil and vegetation are good indicators of changes in the environment. On the examined area is semi-arid, extreme dry where open grassland is the typical vegetation in the Carpathian Basin. Soils are dry, sandy with vegetation types of xerotherm characteristics with dominant endemic species of Fumana procumbens and Festuca vaginata. We examined natural and anthropogenic environments. The urbanization caused growth of nitrate content in the de-graded, shallow, sandy soils, while the physiognomy of the vegetation remained the same with some changes in the species composition: the amount of weeds and species resistant to disturbing grew; the Cynodon dactylon became dominant on grasslands. A new species, Fes-tuca pseudovaginata was identified. This species adapted to the new environment changed by humans. Its economical importance is that animal stock eat it more readily.

ABSTRACT The benefits of low input farming on biodiversity and ecosystem services are already well-established, however most of these studies focus only on the focal field scales. We aimed to study whether these benefits exist at the whole farm scale, to find the main environmental driving effects on biodiversity at the whole farm scale in farms of different grassland grazing intensity, applying three well-known species diversity indicator groups of different ecological traits.Edaphic (earthworms), epigeic (spiders) and flying (bees) taxa were sampled in each identified habitat type within 18 low-input farms in Central Hungary, 2010. The number of habitat types, the number of grassland plots, the cumulative area of grasslands and habitat type had an effect on the species richness and abundance of spiders, while grassland grazing intensity influenced the species richness of bees. Both bees and spiders were sensitive to vegetation and weather conditions, resulting in more bees on flower-rich farms and those having higher temperature; and more spiders on farms with more heterogeneous vegetation structure and in low-wind areas. Relatively few earthworms were found in the whole study, and their abundance was not influenced by any of the farm composition and management variables.We conclude that local field management (grazing intensity of grassland patches) can have a farm scale effect, detectable on species diversity indicators that have high dispersal ability and strong connection to grasslands as important foraging sites (bees). However, other farmland biota (spiders) is also strongly determined by farmland composition and habitat diversity, therefore the maintenance of a mosaic within-farm habitat structure is strongly recommended. The application of earthworms as farmland composition or management indicators is strongly restricted because of their special needs of soil conditions.