App 1: English names of the Á-NÉR habitat types
App 2: Natura 2000 habitats and their Á-NÉR habitats equivalents

The first version of the map of the Hungarian vegetation-based landscape regions were prepared at the scale of 1 : 200,000 (1 km or higher resolution). The primary goal of the map was to provide an exact background for the presentation and evaluation of the data of theMÉTA database. Secondly, we intended to give an up-to-date and detailed vegetation-based division of Hungary with a comprehensive nomenclature of the regions. Regions were primar- ily defined on the basis of their present zonal vegetation, or their dominant extrazonal or edaphic vegetation. Where this was not possible, abiotic factors that influence the potential vegetation, the flora were taken into consideration, thus, political and economical factors were ignored. All region borders were defined by local expert botanists, mainly based on their field knowledge. The map differs in many features from the currently used, country- wide, flora- or geography-based divisions in many features. We consider our map to be temporary (i.e. a work map), and we plan to refine and improve it after 5 years of testing.

Effective conservation of (semi-)natural grasslands requires an understanding of the factors affecting naturalness (i.e. the actual quality of a habitat or vegetation patch) and the importance of the particular factors. Both local or patch, and landscape or matrix, variables affect habitat quality, and the proportions of the effects need to be identified. Therefore, we performed a hypothesis generating and testing analysis with generalised linear models on three typical grassland habitat types (forest steppe meadows, Artemisia alkali steppes, forest steppe meadows, and lowland wetmeadows), differing in their fragmentation, ecology and history, and representing characteristic types of grassland habitats with the use of the national database of the vegetation of Hungary (MÉTA). Our results, in general, show that naturalness depends upon both intra-habitat and matrix attributes: presence or proportion of other habitat types in the surrounding landscape, threatening factors and landscape ecological attributes. Higher number of habitat types and higher proportions of (semi-)natural habitats in the landscape have significant effects: presence of other grassland types similar in ecological demands to the model habitat positively affect the naturalness, while non-characteristic, secondary or disturbed habitats and invasive alien species have negative effects. However, there are clear differences among the three habitat types, indicating that, for effective conservation, good knowledge of conserved habitat types is essential. Landscape or matrix factors, both compositional and structural, affecting habitat patch quality have significant effects that cannot be overlooked. In the case of fragmented grasslands, matrix factors might be even more important than patch or local factors.

Researchers of the MÉTA program have a strong demand to perform flexible and effective queries for further analyses of the database. Structured query language was applied and a web-based application was developed to facilitate understanding of database structure and content in detail, to help develop, store and annotate of SQL query statements, to help reuse of them, to facilitate save and download resulted data sets to the authorised users through the internet. A brief description of the MÉTA SQL Expert Interface and Access Service is given here, and several commented query examples demonstrate the easy and effective usage of the service.

The survey results of the MÉTA program are managed with centralised relational database management system (MS SQL 2000) developed and set up in a local area network. Besides the MÉTA database server, a publishing server, an archiving server and a GIS workstation were applied. The core information entities of the MÉTA database are: information subproject, MÉTA quadrate, MÉTA hexagon, (semi-)natural habitat, potential vegetation with numerous habitats, landscape ecology and land use attributes, and surveyor. This information is coded in the nine main tables of the normalised database. In the recent state there are almost 1,500,000 records in the main tables that are managed in 241 independent fields. The published version of theMÉTAdatabase supports the query service, and handles this information in 7 denormalised main tables. This much more redundant version is 11 GB in size. The 20.6% (179 man-month) of the human resources in the MÉTA program were devoted to the information tasks (set up and preparation, MÉTA database and information system development, replenishment and quality assessment, MÉTA query, GIS and printing services) between 2002 and 2007. The basic structure of the MÉTA database version 1.2 is finalised and the main functions regarding data processing have been developed. The accomplishment is higher than 90%, quality assessment is under way, while scientific verification and data harmonisation are started. The area of (semi-)natural and degraded vegetation of Hungary is estimated to 1,800,000 hectares (19.4% of the country) of which the natural, semi-natural is about 1,200,000 hectares (12.9% of the country). All of these are highly fragmented and unevenly distributed over the country. It is shown by several basic figures, professional content and quality measure facts of the database. There is also a fact sheet of surveyors that shapes the important characters of their field experience profile, too.

In this paper we present an implementation of the natural capital index (NCI), a highly aggregated policy-relevant biodiversity indicator for Hungary, based on the MÉTA database, a detailed field-based vegetation database with a habitat quality attribute. To this end, we introduce two different weighting schemes for the field-estimated MÉTA values, both rooted in the concept of ecosystem services: a linear “equal steps” (NCIlin) and an exponential (NCIexp) weighting scheme. The natural capital index of Hungary and its physical geographical regions are calculated and presented from both aspects. The national NCIlin is 9.9% (indicating an overall 90% loss in the availability of the major supporting ecosystem services), and NCIexp is 3.2% (indicating an even greater degree of loss in terms of the conservation of rare species). The geographical regions of Hungary exhibit considerable spatial variation, which reveals important information on their basic characteristics (e.g. agricultural potential) and land use history. As NCI can be calculated on any spatial scales from local to national, this indicator may become a useful tool for policy development and evaluation purposes, including environmental impact assessments (EIA) and strategic environmental assessments (SEI). However, due to several conceptual limitations (e.g. disregard for rarity, spatial structure and cultural values, questions of recency and repetition) NCI should not be regarded as a self-sufficient universal tool, and strategic decisions should be based on careful consideration of all potentially relevant factors.

The mosaic of open sandy grasslands and poplar-juniper thickets – the focal habitat of the KISKUN LTER – is the second most invaded habitat (after the riverine shrublands and woodlands) in Hungary according to the MÉTA-database. The most dangerous invasive species in this habitat are Robinia pseudo-acacia, Asclepias syriaca, Solidago gigantea, S. canadensis, Ailanthus altissima, and Elaeagnus angustifolia

The focal questions of most research projects has a regional context from landscape to regional scale. There is a high priority of understanding the landscape ecological, ecosystem, land use, biodiversity and socio-economic patterns and processes of the region also. Therefore several projects and considerable efforts were done to create, collect and manage relevant maps and GIS databases of the Danube–Tisza Interfluve.

Previous overviews of plant invasion in Hungary were based on local case studies and the authors’ experience. The MÉTA survey provided an opportunity to outline a more exact picture based on the survey of the whole country. This paper summarises the basic statistics related to plant invasion: cover of invaded area estimated for the country, each geographical region and each distinguished (semi-)natural habitat category, and cover of the selected 15 alien species in each habitat category.

Effective conservation of (semi-)natural habitats needs knowledge on the naturalness, the actual quality of a habitat or vegetation patch. Nevertheless, there are only a few studies have been published in this topic so far. During the MÉTA project, between 2002–2005, we have surveyed the semi-natural vegetation of Hungary and assessed the naturalness of the predefined 86 habitat types. In this paper we present the country scale analysis on the naturalness of these habitat types. We compared the naturalness of the individual habitat types and also habitat groups, as well as the naturalness of the physical macroregions of Hungary. Euhydrophyte habitats and habitats deserving high abiotic stress are the most natural ones, while secondary shrublands, uncharacteristic forests and grasslands are the less natural. For the forest habitats we compared and discussed the naturalness values given by the MÉTA mappers and the values gained in the TERMERD (assessing forest naturalness in Hungary) project. In case of regions, Kisalföld has the lowest naturalness, and surprisingly the quality of the Alföld and the Középhegység is nearly equal if we consider only the remained vegetation.