THREATENING FACTORS ENCOUNTERED: ACTUAL ENDANGERMENT OF THE HUNGARIAN (SEMI-)NATURAL HABITATS

Due to the global land use and climate change, endangerment of natural vegetation is in-creasing. That is why the threatening factors were documented in details during the MÉTA mapping. We have documented the impacts of water management, land use (management of woodlands and grasslands), the invasive species, urbanisation, habitat fragmentation and the neighbourhood, as well. In the present article (1) we evaluate the actual state of the habitats by the 28 threat types documented during the MÉTA mapping; (2) we introduce 12 newly developed indicators, which were applied for the semi-quantitative comparison of the overall degree of endangerment of the Hungarian habitats. Based on the summarisation of our results the most seriously endangered habitats in Hungary are as follows: sand and loess steppe oak woodlands (M2, M4, L2x), tussock sedge communities (B4), extensive orchards (P7), closed lowland oak woodlands (L5, L6), wa-ter-fringing and fen tall herb communities (D5), wooded pastures (P45), vegetation of loess cliffs (I2), rich fens and Molinia meadows (D1, D2), Cynosurion grasslands and Nardus swards (E34), swamp woodlands (J2), xero-mesophilous grasslands (H4) and salt steppe oak woodlands (M3). The least endangered types are the rocky habitats (I4, LY3, H1, G2, M7), certain halophytic (F1a, F5, F1b, F2, B6) and aquatic habitats (A23, A3a, A1), open acidophilous woodlands (L4b), dry shrub vegetation with Crataegus and Prunus spinosa (P2b) and the beech woodlands (K5). Key words: evaluation for nature conservation, indicators, landscape ecology 0236–6495/ $ 20.00 © 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapes