Detailed Conference Program

25 September (Monday) Workshop, registration, keynote lecture

09:00 – 19:00 Registration

10:00 – 12:00 Workshop: Introduction to grassland related spiders (indoor presentations) (Róbert Gallé, Tomas Hamrík, and Nikolett Gallé-Szpisjak)

12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break (for the participants of the workshop)

13:00 – 15:00 Workshop: Introduction to grassland related spiders (outdoor program)

15:00 – 17:30 Guided tour in the zoo of the National Park

17:45 – 18:30 Keynote lecture by András Kelemen: New challenges of nature conservation in the light of landscape-level changes in the Great Hungarian Plain

18:30 – 21:00 Welcome reception

26 September (Tuesday) Talks and poster session

08:00 – 12:00 Registration

09:00 – 09:15 Opening ceremony

09:15 – 10:00 Plenary talk by Corradó Marceno: Data collected by amateur botanists: coupling an old tradition and citizen science offers new opportunities for habitat monitoring and conservation

10:00 – 11:00 Talks

• 10:00 – 10:15 Melinda Halassy: Reducing the establishment of invasive alien species by sowing high density or competitive native species

• 10:15 – 10:30 ♣ Boglárka Berki: Impact of four years of mechanical treatment of the invasive plant Asclepias syriaca L. on other plants species in secondary grasslands
• 10:30 – 10:45 ♣ Judit Sonkoly: Commercial potting substrates as an overlooked way of the long-distance dispersal of plants
• 10:45 – 11:00 ♣ Patricia Elizabeth Diaz Cando: Establishment of Sporobolus cryptandrus (Torr.) A. Grey (Poaceae) - a new invasive species in Hungary

11:00 – 11:30 Coffee break

11:30 – 13:30 Talks

• 11:30 – 11:45 Martin Magnes: Forest steppes on serpentinite outcrops in Austria: a distinctive habitat or just a mosaic?

• 11:45 – 12:00 ♣ Svenja Wanke: Elevational patterns in calcareous grassland community diversity and flower colour spectra in the European Alps
• 12:00 – 12:15 ♣ Lara Mołoniewicz: Plant diversity patterns in an endangered semi-open forest in central Poland – the example of Krzemionki Nature Reserve
• 12:15 – 12:30 ♣ Szymon Czyżewski: Niche of plant species native to the temperate forest biome in Europe matches a heterogenous natural vegetation shaped by megaherbivores
• 12:30 – 12:45 Rocco Labadessa: Ancient stone burial mounds as refuges against grassland degradation
• 12:45 – 13:00 Balázs Deák: Environmental heterogeneity driven plant diversity on ancient burial mounds in Hungary and Bulgaria
• 13:00 – 13:15 György Kröel-Dulay: The importance of extreme drought and chronic change in precipitation in a grassland field experiment
• 13:15 – 13:30 Marianne Stoessel: Where do reindeer graze? A study about the interplay between landscape features and grazing on plant communities in the warming tundra

13:30 – 15:00 Lunch break

15:00 – 15:45 Plenary talk by Denys Vynokurov: New insights on the broad-scale classification of European dry grasslands and scrub vegetation

15:45 – 17:15 Talks

• 15:45 – 16:00 Jürgen Dengler: Classification of the high-rank syntaxa of the Balkan dry grasslands with a new hierarchical expert system approach: now finished

• 16:00 – 16:15 Piotr Chmielewski: Dry grasslands in the alkaline fens near the city of Chełm (Lublin province, SE Poland)
• 16:15 – 16:30 Hallie Seiler: Effects of irrigation on dry grasslands in Valais (Switzerland)
• 16:30 – 16:45 Stefan Widmer: Epochal changes in grassland diversity in Switzerland
• 16:45 – 17:00 ♣ Rozália Kapás: The role of livestock grazing and connectivity in recovery of grassland communities following restoration
• 17:00 – 17:15 Benito Schöpke: Plant species response at the interface of crop fields to protected grasslands – impact of farm practices

17:15 – 17:45 Coffee break

17:45 – 19:00 Poster session

• 1. Iwona Dembicz: Drivers of plant diversity in grasslands on mineral islands surrounded by peatlands (Biebrza valley, NE Poland)
• 2. ♣ Olena Shchepeleva: Ancient defensive earthworks as refuges for steppe flora in Southern Ukraine
• 3. ♣ Nadiia Skobel: Old cemeteries of the Right-Bank Cereal Step as refuge of steppe flora
• 4. Santiago Ordonez: A call to join the study of Salvia nemorosa L. demography on kurgans
• 5. ♣ Vivien Szász: The effect of kurgan area and isolation on Salvia nemorosa L. in fragmented dry grasslands
• 6. ♣ Laura Godó: Vegetation of mound-building mouse mounds in two different habitat types
• 7. Rita Engel: Ancient burial mounds provide ecosystem services by preserving
  medicinal plants from grasslands
• 8. Iryna Rabyk: Study of the peculiarities of the bryophyte cover of the dry meadows of south-eastern Alps
• 9. ♣ Viktória Törő-Szijgyártó: The relationship between seed size, shape and persistence in the Hungarian flora
• 10. Liubov Borsukevych: Vegetation dynamics on riverine sand dunes in the Dnieper River basin
• 11. Andrea McIntosh-Buday: Biomass-species richness relationship along an elevation stress gradient at an alkaline-loess habitat complex
• 12. Sonja Škornik: Functional traits of transient plant species in two semi-natural dry grassland communities
• 13. ♣ Ágnes Tóth: Vertical distribution of soil seed bank and the ecological importance of deeply buried seeds in alkaline grasslands
• 14. ♣ Katalin Lukács: A new aspect of seed dispersal: Human-dispersed propagules can survive and disperse after laundry washing
• 15. Anikó Csecserits: Sign of stability or very slow changes? No difference in the level of invasion after a decade neither on primary sandy grasslands nor on old-fields
• 16. József Geml: Ectomycorrhizal fungi in a Pannonian sandy forest steppe landscape: a comparison of open and closed grasslands and poplar woodlands
• 17. Meso Odongo: Decreasing provenance differentiation in the second generation of Festuca vaginata supports flexible seed sourcing for restoration in Hungary
• 18. Orsolya Kiss: Using species distribution modelling to design conservation strategies for the European roller
• 19. Inge Paulini: Impact of mowing abandonment and grazing on very species-rich meadow steppes in Transylvania (Romania)

27 September (Wednesday) Mid-conference excursion, Grassland Party and Auction

8:00 – 8:30 Presentations about the habitats and species of the Körös-Maros National Park (Péter Bánfi, Ábel Molnár)

08:30 – Departure from Szarvas, from the Visitor Center

8:30 – 18:30 Mid-conference excursion (Ábel Molnár, Péter Bánfi, Judit Sallainé Kapocsi)

18:30 – 22:00 Grassland party and auction at the visitor centre

28 September (Thursday) Talks and poster session

09:00 – 10:30 Talks

• 09:00 – 09:15 Janine Ruffer: Restoration of dry and sandy habitats in Brandenburg, Germany by LIFE projects

• 09:15 – 09:30 Gwyn Jones: How many livestock are needed to maintain EU priority habitats?
• 09:30 – 09:45 Markus Wagner: Mob grazing: A new approach to grazing management on British farms producing pasture-fed livestock
• 09:45 – 10:00 ♣ Szabolcs Balogh: Grassland management experiences of Hortobágy National Park Directorate in the contex of LIFE IP GRASSLAND-HU project
• 10:00 – 10:15 Maija Medne: "Blooming Meadows": Implementation of Result Based Conservation Scheme in Latvia
• 10:15 – 10:30 Katalin Török: How three decades of grassland restoration can develop to a long-term international research network?

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 – 11:45 Plenary talk by Szabolcs Lengyel: Grassland restoration and management: a focus on animals

11:45 – 13:15 Talks

• 11:45 – 12:00 Leonardo Ancillotto: The night shift: bioacoustics at night disclose ecological relationships in Mediterranean dry grasslands

• 12:00 – 12:15 Márton Szabolcs: Habitat selection and breeding success of tree-nesting forest steppe birds in a restored grassland ecosystem
• 12:15 – 12:30 Stephen Venn: The effects of management on plant and carabid diversity of sub-arctic riparian flood meadows in northwestern Finland
• 12:30 – 12:45 Mylene Martinez: Spiders in the Estonian coastal grasslands during the era of Anthropocene
• 12:45 – 13:00 ♣ Edvárd Mizsei: Enhancing habitat occupancy of the endangered Hungarian meadow viper (Vipera ursinii rakosiensis) through restoration of plant diversity of secondary grasslands on abandoned ploughfields
• 13:00 – 13:15 Orsolya Valkó: Burrowing rodents as ecosystem engineers in Eurasian grasslands – case studies from Kazakhstan and Hungary

13:15 – 14:45 Lunch break

14:45 – 15:45 Talks

• 14:45 – 15:00 ♣ Gantuya Batgelder: Traditional ecological and herding knowledge in the forest steppe region in Mongolia

• 15:00 – 15:15 Marianna Biró: Oral history reveals driver interactions behind land-use legacies in a transforming cultural landscape
• 15:15 – 15:30 ♣ Ábel Péter Molnár: The Flora Continuity Hypothesis: massive potential survival of the flora since before the Last Glacial Maximum in the Carpatho-Pannonian region
• 15:30 – 15:45 Attila Molnár: Could hundreds of species have disappeared from loess grasslands as they were ploughed up? Undocumented loss and extinction debt in the Hungarian Great Plain

15:45 – 17:00 Poster session

• 20. Kalina Pachedjieva: Communities with high abundance of the Balkan subendemic Satureja pilosa in Bulgaria
• 21. Anna Cwener: The small-scale geographic diversity of dry grasslands of the Lubelskie region (Lublin province, SE Poland)
• 22. Lyubov Felbaba-Klushyna: Syntaxonomy of subalpine meadows of the Borzhava mountain massif (Ukrainian Carpathians)
• 23. Oksana Tyshchenko: Monitoring polygons of steppes and Azov-type spits: application of remote sensing data for assessing the status of vegetation cover
• 24. Svitlana Iemelianova: AveWetlands – a new project to assess the annual vegetation diversity of European wetlands
• 25. Hrvoje Kutnjak: Comprehensive approach to restoration of dry Mediterranean grasslands on Dinara with the aim of preserving Natura 2000 target bird species
• 26. Sandra Dullau: Seed-based grassland establishment in solar parks - combining renewable energy production with ecosystem services associated with pollinator
• 27. Roman Hamersky: Degradation and re-gradation of meadow's plant species diversity under different management pressure at the unique Adenophora liliifolia locality
• 28. ♣ Réka Fekete: Restoration and managements of urban grasslands – a global review
• 29. ♣ Réka Kiss: Effect of climatic parameters on the population dynamics of Bulbocodium vernum
• 30. ♣ Sándor Borza: Hitchhiking seeds – The role of off-road vehicles in seed dispersal in protected areas
• 31. Domas Uogintas: What impact does grassland abandonment have on forage quality compared to mowing?
• 32. ♣ Dariia Borovyk: The impact of low-intensity, regular-intensity mowing and mowing abandonment on a diversity of semi-natural grasslands in South Moravia (Czech Republic)
• 33. Viktor Shapoval: Vegetation management of the Budzhatskyi steppes (Odesa region, Ukraine)
• 34. ♣ Gergő Rák: Effects of Grazing Pressure and Phytomass Productivity on the Density of the Hungarian Meadow Viper (Vipera ursinii rakosiensis) in Kiskunság
• 35. ♣ Gergely Kovacsics-Vári: Effect of increasing intensity of sheep grazing on the biomass composition of acidic sand grasslands

17:00 – 17:30 Coffee break

17:30 – 19:00 EDGG General Assembly and closing ceremony

29 September – 1 October (Friday-Sunday) Post-conference excursion

29 September 08:00 Departure from Szarvas

1 October 17:00 Arrival at Kecskemét

♣ Young Investigator Prize (YIP) applicant