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• The role of soil seed bank in restoration and dynamics of Hungarian plant communities

  116-135

  Réka Kiss

  Views:

  133

  Soil seed bank has an important role in maintaining plant populations and communities, in regeneration processes, and also provides information about the history of the studied site, the past land use practices, the biotic and abiotic changes and about the current degradation degree. In Hungary there are many researchers related to the seed bank, but from the last few years we do not have a comprehensive work about the results of these works. My goal is to report on the results of former seed bank researches in Hungary and also to highlight the missing topics and further research opportunities. The review is based on 49 articles, the oldest one dates back to 1922, the newest one was published in 2015. Most of the studies use greenhouse or laboratory germination tests to determine the viability of seeds. The earliest studies, which examined the weed seed bank of farmland soils found, that the seed bank was much higher than the total seed bank found on natural and semi-natural habitats studied later. Researchers found the lowest seed bank density in forests. Disturbed sites and former agricultural sites had higher seed bank densities than sites without agricultural use. Most part of seed bank was located in the upper soil layer in all studied communities. In most studies usually a small similarity was detected between the composition of soil seed bank and aboveground vegetation, which suggests that the seed bank has a subordinate role in regeneration processes. Seed bank type classification is lacking from the three-quarter of Hungarian flora species, despite that it is essential for protecting species and communities and for developing proper protection against invasive and alien species.

• Short communications

  257–266

  Balázs Deák

  Katalin Lukács

  Ferenc Báthori

  Orsolya Valkó

  Norbert Bauer

  Csaba Molnár

  László Nagy

  László Kulcsár

  Wilfried Voigt

  Márta Mária Szalai-Dobosné

  Views:

  759

  1. Occurrence of Ophioglossum vulgatum in a dry loess grassland in the Tiszafüred–Kunhegyes plain (Great Hungarian Plain)

  2. Dolomite rocky grassland species introduced by raw materials of a road construction (Kecskemét, Great Hungarian Plain)

  3. Geranium divaricatum on the Hevesi-sík, next to Füzesabony (Great Hungarian Plain)

  4. Ophrys sphegodes in the Castriferreicum (W Hungary)

  5. First occurrence of Cephalanthera longifolia var. rosea in Hungary

  6. Spiraea crenata in the Eastern Bakony Mts (Transdanubian Range, Hungary)

• Contributions to the flora of kurgans in the Middle Tisza region

  94–105

  Balázs Deák

  Péter Török

  Béla Tóthmérész

  Szilvia Radócz

  Katalin Lukács

  Orsolya Valkó

  Views:

  552

  Kurgans are ancient burial mounds built by nomadic steppic cultures. Embedded in the heavily transformed landscapes of the Carpathian Basin they often serve as last refuges for rare and endangered plant species. In our paper we publish floristic data collected on 82 kurgans located in the area of the Hortobágy National Park Directorate. Our dataset covers 64 CEU quarter quadrates, and the territory of 45 settlements. We provide data on 39 taxa that are either protected (e.g. Anchusa barrelieri, Centaurea solstitialis, Ranunculus illyricus and Phlomis tuberosa) or regionally rare (e.g. Aegilops cylindrica, Astragalus austriacus, Glaucium corniculatum and Trifolium diffusum). Our records demonstrate that kurgans have a vital role in maintaining the populations of rare and endangered grassland species even in transformed landscapes.

• Specific variability and ecological meaning of seed weights

  295-330

  Judit Sonkoly

  Attila Molnár V.

  Péter Török

  Views:

  189

  There is an almost twelve order of magnitude difference in the seed weight of recent plant species. Studying the causes, patterns and consequences of this high variability is a crucial issue in plant ecology. In this paper we summarise the main conclusions of the studies in this topic to get a broad and general view of the possible explanations of high variability in seed weights and its consequences on dispersal, seed predation, seed bank formation, germination, establishment and plant growth, and on the structure and function of plant communities. Because of the extremely high number of papers published in this topic, we aimed at to concentrate on papers published in highranked international journals in the last few decades, having a special focus on publications from the Carpathian Basin. It was found that growth form, body size, genom size, latitude and light availability are responsible for the detected high variability in the seed weights of species. Infra-individual variability is mostly caused by the effects of the position on the maternal plant and the seed size – seed number trade-off. The effect of dispersal by wind or by seed predators on the variability of seed weights and its ecological consequences are the most studied. Predicting persistence on the basis of seed size and seed shape also has been a popular research topic lately. Studying the effects of seed weight variability on the structure of plant communities is also becoming more and more important, but no general conclusions could be drawn yet.