Parts of the whole: Linking disciplines in conservation biology as it is reflected by the First Hungarian Conservation Biology Conference
Abstract
How far has conservation biology got in Hungary till now? To what extent does it show the interdisciplinarity of this field of science? And how does it manage to link theory and practice? We aimed to answer these questions by analysing almost 200 talks and posters presented at the 1st Hungarian Conservation Biological Conference (HCBC I). We classified the presentations according to their topic, the taxonomic position of their subjects and the type of the conservation biological problem they mentioned. Our results show that numerous monitoring studies have been carried out (42% of all the studies), which is a positive development compared to their relative scarcity found five years ago. We argue that this change is most probably due to the establishment of the Hungarian Biodiversity Monitoring System. Not only has it encouraged monitoring studies, but also provided a scientific framework for them. Although a relatively high number of researches (among other conservation related activities) were presented (25% of all the presentations), only a small proportion propose that better co-operation between theory and practice should be encouraged by organising common forums (like the HCBC I) for experts working in these two different areas, providing more financial support for applied conservation biological researches and establishing an institutional background for co-ordinating these research activities. Our analyses have also shown that Hungarian conservation biologists work on a wide range of taxonomic groups, which is also a big leap forward compared to the earlier extreme predominance of investigations on flowering plants and vertebrates. The presentations drew attention to several factors threatening protected plants and animals, among which the most frequent ones were deleterious human interventions, habitat destruction and agriculture. Taken together our results show that Hungarian conservation biology follows the right path, however, to make it a more effective tool of protecting biodiversity the co-operation between theoretical studies and practical applications should be improved further.
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