Szilágyi, G.; Gulyás, S.; Vári, T.Z.; Sümegi, P. Late Quaternary Paleoecology and Environmental History of the Hortobágy, an Alkaline Steppe in Central Europe. Diversity2024, 16, 67.
Szilágyi, G.; Gulyás, S.; Vári, T.Z.; Sümegi, P. Late Quaternary Paleoecology and Environmental History of the Hortobágy, an Alkaline Steppe in Central Europe. Diversity 2024, 16, 67.
Szilágyi, G.; Gulyás, S.; Vári, T.Z.; Sümegi, P. Late Quaternary Paleoecology and Environmental History of the Hortobágy, an Alkaline Steppe in Central Europe. Diversity2024, 16, 67.
Szilágyi, G.; Gulyás, S.; Vári, T.Z.; Sümegi, P. Late Quaternary Paleoecology and Environmental History of the Hortobágy, an Alkaline Steppe in Central Europe. Diversity 2024, 16, 67.
Abstract
Hungary's first national park was created in 1973 in the Hortobágy area to protect Europe's largest contiguous steppe area with its flora and fauna. The Hortobágy National Park - the Puszta was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a cultural landscape in 1999. The park's outstanding importance is due to the predominantly non-arboreal steppe vegetation, home to a unique bird fauna, and the alkaline and chernozem soils with a complex, mosaic-like spatial structure. In addition, the landscape of the Hortobágy has a pastoral history stretching back thousands of years. Several hypotheses have been put forward, which suggest that the alkaline soils and the habitats that cover them were formed as a result of human activities related to river regulation that began in the second half of the 19th century. However, palaeoecological and palaeobiological studies over the last 30-40 years have pointed to the natural origin of the alkaline steppes, dating back to the end of the Ice Age. For thousands of years human activities, in particular grazing by domestic animals, hardly influenced the natural evolution of the area. Drainage of marshy and flooded areas began in the 19th century, and the introduction of more and more intensive agriculture, had a significant impact on the landscape. This paper aims to describe the past natural development of this special alkaline steppe ecosystem, with particular reference to the impacts of past and present human activities, including conservation measures.
Keywords
undisturbed core sequence; Holocene and Pleistocene paleobotanical data; salty environment; alkalinization; Hortobágy National Park; Carpathian Basin
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Paleontology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
