Ecological models and evaluations in a changing environment – a selection from recent results

Abstract

Agricultural activities are responsible for human well-being while they are facing challenges of increasing impact in a changing environment. Hungary is highly exposed to climate change due to its special location in the middle of Europe. Because of their wide-spread interdependencies, problems aroused in agriculture need interdisciplinary cooperation to be explored.

In our talk, we introduce some new results from the recent researches performed at Szent Istv´an University, Faculty of Horticultural Sciences.

We outline the structure of some problems and the way of communication between researchers from different disciplines. Questions, amongst others, are discussed about

• how to find easily measurable and effective indicators to describe the biodiversity quality of agricultural landscapes or the suitability of agricultural soil;
• how to measure and manage warming and drought stress from different aspects such as in cases of soil microarthropod communities or medicinal and aromatic plants or invasive pests or the development process and frost volatility of fruit varieties.

We show the exciting process of how from a complex but well formulated ecology problem we can create a simple mathematical model with which we can highlight the main points of the issue.

Biography

Professor Marta Ladanyi works for Szent István University, Faculty of Horticulture, Dpt. of Biometrics and Agricultural Informatics, Budapest, Hungary, Europe. She is an associate professor, the head of the department. Her special field is applied statistics in life sciences including modelling, advanced data management and multivariate statistical analysis.

She has experience in applications in pomology, entomology, plant protection, soil sciences, climate change impact studies, viticulture, botany, vegetable, mushroom, medical and aromatic plant cultivation, dendrology etc. She usually uses statistical softwares, amongst others, SPSS and R.

She has 30 years of teaching experience in applied statistics for BSc, MSc and PhD students in horticultural studies. Most of her students are Hungarian, however, she has several students from several countries, from time to time, also from China.