Conservation status of hay meadows highly depends on their management. The main goal of this study was to assess the efficiency of different mowing regimes in maintenance of plant species richness and diversity of mesic hay meadows. The field experiment was carried out on a species rich, mesic hay meadow in Western Hungary. We evaluated the effects of four alternative types of management on the plant community after 7 years of continuous treatment: (1) mowing twice a year, typical traditional management, (2) mowing once a year in May, most practised currently by local farmers, (3) mowing once a year in September, often proposed for conservation management and (4) abandonment of mowing. Both cutting frequency and timing had significant effects on species richness and diversity of vegetation. Traditional mowing resulted in significantly higher number and higher diversity of vascular plant species than other mowing regimes. Mowing twice a year was the only efficient way to control the spread of the invasive Solidago gigantea, and mowing in September was more successful in it than mowing in May. We conclude that the traditional mowing regime is the most suitable to maintain botanical diversity of mesic hay meadows, however other regimes should also be considered if certain priority species are targeted by conservation.
Traditional ecological knowledge of plants is an important aspect of scholarship in relation to land use and contributes to the sustainable use and management of natural resources as well as to the monitoring of changes in the natural environment. The aim of the present paper was to examine traditional ecological knowledge in Hungarian communities in Slovenia in connection with knowledge of the plants growing in the region, their local names, and their uses. We quantified the earlier role of the utilized plant species in order to determine the former significance of certain species. We carried out structured interviews with a total of 20 individuals in three studied settlements. In the Hungarian communities in Slovenia, we uncovered knowledge of a total of 130 folk taxa. Of these, 123 taxa have local names. The majority of the folk taxa can be correlated with a single biological species. A significant proportion of the known species were utilized in some way, most of them as medicinal plants, wild edible plants, or ornamental plants. As in other farming communities, the most important species are mainly woody plants, which include the common hornbeam, the common juniper, and the silver birch. Among the herbaceous plants, utilization of the dandelion, nettle, and bulrush was significant. Members of the older generations living in the Hungarian communities in Slovenia still retain knowledge of plants that were once used on a daily basis, along with their local names and the traditional ecological knowledge connected with their earlier use.
<p>Traditional, small scale land use based on landscape potential is mostly less harmful to the ecosystem compared to present high production-oriented practices. However, low-intensity techniques are generally under-represented in the present land management system or even forgotten. We reveal these ancient management methods and practices in a western Transdanubian forest-dominated landscape of the Carpathian basin (&#336;rs&#233;g) through interviews with local elderly people, literature review, historical map-based long term land use change detection and landscape character assessment. We evaluate the results from the point of view of the question: how these solutions could be helpful for the fight against biodiversity loss or even climate change.</p><p>Acknowledgement: Project no. 141576 has been implemented with the support provided by the Ministry of Innovation and Technology of Hungary from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund, financed under the MEC_R_21 funding scheme.</p>
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