On behalf of the Institute for Soil Sciences, Péter Csontos, the scientific advisor of the Department of Soil Biology, participated in the project, who enriched the database with determination of thousand seed masses of the species as well as their classification into soil seed bank types. In addition to plant traits in the strict sense, the database also covers further plant properties, such as ecological indicator values or ecological strategies that characterize the complex adaptation of plants. With the help of such data, not only individual species can be compared, but also plant communities can be evaluated, regardless of the taxonomic affiliation of their species pools. By creating PADAPT, Hungarian researchers have successfully joined the contemporary trends that has lasted for about two decades, in which the world’s leading plant ecology centres have already created several international plant trait databases, such as LEDA, CLO-PLA or TRY. Although these latter databases contain data on many characteristics of a very large number of species, they are less applicable in the case of regional-scale studies in Eastern and Central Eastern Europe. One of the reasons for this is that climatic and other environmental factors can have a great impact on certain plant traits, so plant trait data from other geographical regions are not necessarily relevant in the Pannonian region, and their species set does not sufficiently cover the flora in the Pannonicum. These problems were remedied by the PADAPT project, which collected the plant traits and further characteristics of the species of the Pannonian flora.
💻
Project website: https://padapt.eu/
📷
Photo: Péter Csontos: European spindle (Euonymus europaeus) alongside a dirt road in the vicinity of village Dinnyés
