Prioritization of restoration interventions in sandy areas based on potential vegetation and local environmental factors

Our aim is to develop a restoration decision-support system for sandy habitats that identifies areas where restoration of sandy habitats should be prioritised and indicates appropriate types of restoration interventions. The elements of this system will also contribute to the development of national restoration priorities planned within the Green Infrastructure project and the Nature Restoration Regulation. In prioritising restoration interventions, we consider regeneration capacity, local and landscape-level environmental conditions (Csákvári et al. 2021, 2022), accumulated knowledge from previous restoration projects, and green infrastructure (GI) planning considerations. The prioritisation process starts from sandy areas identified for ecosystem conversion within green infrastructure development planning (Szitár et al. 2021). To identify target communities, we use predictions from the Multiple Potential Natural Vegetation

(MPNV) models and subsequently refine their prioritisation based on local abiotic conditions and landscape-level naturalness and land use.

1. First, we selected from the sandy areas identified for GI development those with a potentially high probability of occurrence of natural grasslands (rank 3 or 4), but without exceptionally high potential for forest establishment. We then established a separate priority ranking for each target sandy habitat based on the MPNV predictions. Habitats with high potential are assigned priority for restoration. Those with moderate potential (rank 2) may still be considered as target habitats as components of mosaics, whereas habitats with low potential (rank 1) are not recommended as restoration targets. Finally, we overlaid the potential distribution maps of the three target habitats to identify potential habitat mosaics where multiple habitats may occur with high potential.

2. In the second step, we established priorities based on local abiotic factors. The factors considered were soil sand content, topographic variability, mean groundwater level, temperature, and precipitation seasonality. The relevance and threshold values of these factors vary among habitats. For each target habitat, these relationships were determined using a random forest approach (Csákvári et al. 2021).

Publications:

Csákvári E., Bede-Fazekas Á., Horváth F., Molnár Zs., Halassy M. (2021). Do environmental predictors affect the regeneration capacity of sandy habitats? A country-wide survey from Hungary. Global Ecology and Conservation, 27(4):e01547, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2021.e01547

Csákvári E., Molnár Zs., Halassy, M. (2022). Estimates of regeneration potential in the Pannonian sand region help prioritize ecological restoration interventions. Communications Biology 5, 1136, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-04047-8

Szitár K., Csőszi M., Vaszócsik V., Schneller K., Csecserits A., Kollányi L., Teleki M., Kiss D., Bánhidai A., Jáger K., Petrik O., Pataki R., Lehoczki R., Halassy M., Tanács E., Kertész M., Csákvári E., Somodi I., Lengyel A., Gallé R., Weiperth A., Konkoly-Gyuró É., Máté K., Keszthelyi Á.B., Török K. (2021). Az országos zöldinfrastruktúrahálózat kijelölésének módszertana többszempontú állapotértékelés alapján. Természetvédelmi Közlemények, 27: 145–157. https://doi.org/10.20332/tvk-jnatconserv.2021.27.145