Publication: Kata, Balázs and Péter’s paper has been published in Global Ecology and Conservation with the title: “Combination of organic farming and flower strips in agricultural landscapes – A feasible method to maximise functional diversity of plant traits related to pollination”. July 2022.

Publication: Tamás and Péter’s paper has been published in Global Ecology and Conservation with the title: “No place for ground-dwellers in cities: A meta-analysis on bird functional traits”. Our study indicated that cities need more intact and extensively managed grasslands to sustain bird communities, which provide valuable ecosystem services. July 2022.

Fieldwork: With the lead of Bori, we compare soil invertebrates of annual and perennial flower strips using lawns as a control in a landscape-scale study in Budapest. June 2022.

Publication: Riho as a co-author published a paper in Journal of Avian Biology with the title of "Bird migration in space and time: chain migration by Eurasian curlew Numenius arquata arquata along the East Atlantic Flyway". We found that curlews exhibited chain migration throughout the East Atlantic Flyway with individuals wintering at more southern latitudes breeding farther south, and individuals wintering at higher latitudes breeding farther north and east. June 2022.

Interview: Péter gave an interview to The Food Fix podcast of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism about how effective different agricultural methods are at supporting wild bee populations in relation to their recent publication. June 2022.

Interview: Dávid gave an interview to Radio Klub's conservation and environmental protection broadcast: the 'Green club'. He suggested some nature-based solutions for mitigating the effect of urbanization on beneficial insects in cities based on our latest meta-analysis on this topic. June 2022.

Blog post: Csaba Tölgyesi wrote a blog entry in the Applied Ecologist blog of the British Ecological Society about their paper with Attila, Róbert and Niki, where they call attention to the biodiversity conservation potential of drainage canals in desiccated, heavily transformed regions. May 2022.

Publication: Bori’s paper has been published in Applied Soil Ecology with the title: “Changes in soil moisture and temperature modify the toxicity of sodium selenite and sodium selenate for Folsomia candida (Collembola) Willem 1902”. Our study showed how climate change via heat and drought increases the toxicity of selenium to springtails. May 2022.

Publication: Péter and his colleagues published a case study in Basic and Applied Ecology with the title of "Not only hedgerows, but also flower fields can enhance bat activity in intensively used agricultural landscapes". We showed that to promote bats and to ensure their biological control services, it is important to establish and maintain hedgerows and flower fields in intensively used agricultural landscapes. May 2022.

Editorial membership: Balázs became a member of editorial broad of the journal Landscape Ecology. Happy editorial work! May 2021.

Fieldwork: Riho and his team successfully finished the first year Marie Curie fellowship fieldwork with bumblebee colonies in Hungarian and Austrian oilseed rape and cereal fields. They studied bumblebees colony traffic rate and fitness, performed translocation experiment, and collected bumblebees pollen baskets. May 2022.

Publication: Péter and Teja’s paper has been published in Basic and Applied Ecology with the title: “Scale-dependent effectiveness of on-field vs. off-field agri-environmental measures for wild bees”. Our study showed how spatial scale, i.e. studied transect, field or farm level, and controlling for yield loss, can drastically change the evaluation of biodiversity benefits of on-field (organic farming) vs. off-field (flower strips) schemes. May 2022.

Publication: Péter co-authored a meta-analysis study published in Ecology Letters with the title of "Biodiversity and yield trade-offs for organic farming". We showed that for some taxa in non-cereal crops, switching to organic farming can lead to a biodiversity gain without yield loss. May 2022.

Publication: Dávid, Bori and Péter’s paper has been published in Science of the Total Environment with the title: “Urbanization hampers biological control of insect pests: A global meta-analysis”. Our study showed that advancing urbanization leads to outbreaks of sap-feeding insects, declining numbers of predators with low dispersal abilities, and weakened overall biological pest control delivered by arthropods. April 2022.

Workshop: Péter and Robi participated in the second meeting of the synthesis Biodiversa project, FunProd, at the iDiv in Leipzig, where the group made major steps in ongoing paper writing, new idea generations for further publications and data acquisition. April 2022.

Publication: Bori’s paper has been published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment with the title: "Pollution impacts on water bugs (Nepomorpha , Gerromorpha): state of the art and their biomonitoring potential". Here we showed the great potential of water bugs in salinization monitoring among other environmental stress factors. March 2022.

Publication: Ágota's first paper has been published in Global Ecology and Conservation with the title of "Grassland type and presence of management shape butterfly functional diversity in agricultural and forested landscapes". Here we found that calcareous grasslands are characterised by butterflies having more specialist traits compared to orchard meadows, and are favoured by grassland management and the vicinity of forests. March 2022.

Award: Borbála (Bori) won a two-year Humboldt postdoc fellowship starting in September at the University of Bremen. In her project, she will combine different climate scenarios with toxicity of a fungicide on a springtail and its microbiota. We congratulate! March 2022.

Publication: Our response letter with Teja Tscharntke as lead author has been published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution with the title of "Prioritise the most effective measures for biodiversity-friendly agriculture". Here we emphasized that sustainable farming needs biodiversity-friendly landscapes with semi-natural habitats, small fields, and diversified cropping. March 2022.

Publication: György Kröel-Dulay’s paper has been published in Nature Ecology & Evolution with contributions by Péter and first of all Kata (analysis) with the title: "Field experiments underestimate aboveground biomass response to drought". Here we showed that experimental results may underestimate climate change impacts and highlight the need to integrate results across approaches. March 2022.

New group member: We would welcome Tomáš Hamřík as an external PhD student to our group. Tomáš studies forestry management effects on spiders at Mendel University in Brno, and is co-supervised by Robi. Happy sciencing! Febuary 2022

Collaborative project: We won a bilateral exchange project with South African partners (Dr. Chevonne Reynolds et al.) for studying the effect of habitat fragmentation of mosaic habitats on biodiversity in global North and South. February 2022.

Publication: Robi et al. published an artice in Ecospere with the titel „Landscape structure is a major driver of plant and arthropod diversity in natural European forest fragments”. Here we emphasized the importance of landscape scale heterogeneity in shaping plant, caradib and spider diversity. January 2022.

Publication: Dávid and Viktor’s paper has been published in Arthropod-Plant Interactions with the title: "Host plant identity and condition shape phytophagous insect communities on urban maple (Acer spp.) trees". Here we showed that the abundance of phytophagous insects in the canopy of maple trees is highly determined by tree condition, and field maple had the highest and Norway maple the lowest tolerance for urban stress. January 2022.

Fellowship: Riho won a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship grant. In the next two years, he will make several experiments with bumblebees and study pollinators ecology in Hungarian and Austrian agricultural landscapes, which can be followed on his blog. January 2022.

Publication: Edina and co-authors' paper has been published in Global Ecology and Conservation with the title: “Fragmentation of forest-steppe predicts functional community composition of wild bee and wasp communities”. Our study showed that large and well-connected forest-steppe fragments protect wild bee and wasp communities as well as maintain pollination and predation functions. January 2022