History

The evolution of the Group started by the first project in restoration ecology launched during the winter of 1994-95, when Melinda Halassy joined Katalin Török at the Institute as a student with the aim to help in the research tasks and to produce her MSc theses. The work continued during her PhD scholarship and the collaboration expanded to include other, new research projects and students. The Group itself was not a separate entity and has not exceeded 3-4 persons for a decade or so, with outstanding researchers, like Katalin Szitár, but later new students and scientists got involved in the research tasks and in the mid-2000s the Group was formed.
Beside research projects in restoration ecology, activities involved strategical planning of research in biodiversity and other science-policy interface topics at a European and global scale. The link to the national nature conservation authority (or ministry) is strong for the last twenty years that resulted in collaborations and joint activities, like biodiversity monitoring, seed banking, assessment of ecosystem services and tasks related to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Despite this diversity in activities, the members of the Group tend to be mainly attached to ecological restoration tasks in projects of a broader scale. The responsibilities of the two founders of the group in the Society for Ecological Restoration (also International and European) as Board members dates back to the early 2000s and is still extensive.