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Mapping and assessing ecosystem services (ES) projects at the national level have been implemented recently in the European Union in order to comply with the targets set out in the EU's Biodiversity Strategy for 2020 and later in the Strategy for 2030. In Hungary this work has just been accomplished in a large-scale six-year project. The Hungarian assessment was structured along the ES cascade with each level described by a set of indicators. We present the selected and quantified indicators for 12 ES. For the assessment of cascade level 4, human well-being, a set of relevant well-being dimensions were selected. The whole process was supported by several forms of involvement, interviews, consultations and workshops and in thematic working groups performing the ES quantifications, followed by building scenarios and synthesizing maps and results. Here we give an overview of the main steps and results of the assessment, discuss related conceptual issues and recommend solutions that may be of international relevance. We refine some definitions of the cascade levels and suggest theoretical extensions to the cascade model. By finding a common basis for ES assessments and especially for national ones, we can ensure better comparability of results and better adoption in decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural intensification is one of the major drivers of biotic homogenization and has multiple levels ranging from within-field management intensity to landscape-scale simplification. The enhancement of invertebrate assemblages by establishing new, seminatural habitats, such as set-aside fields can improve biological pest control in adjacent crops, and mitigate the adverse effect of biotic homogenization. In this study we aimed to examine the effects of ecological intensification in winter wheat fields in Hungary. We tested how pests and their natural enemies were affected at different spatial scales by landscape composition (proportion of semi-natural habitats in the surrounding matrix), configuration (presence of adjacent set-aside fields), and local field management practices, such as fertilizer (NPK) applications without applying insecticides. We demonstrated that at the local scale, decreased fertilizer usage had no direct effect either on pests or their natural enemies. Higher landscape complexity and adjacent semi-natural habitats seem to be the major drivers of decreasing aphid abundance, suggesting that these enhanced the predatory insect assemblages. Additionally, the high yield in plots with no adjacent set-aside fields suggests that intensive management can compensate for the lower yields on the extensive plots. Our results demonstrated that although complexity at the landscape scale was crucial for maintaining invertebrate assemblages, divergence in their response to pests and pathogens could also be explained by different dispersal abilities. Although the landscape attributes acted as dispersal filters in the organization of pest and pathogen assemblages in croplands, the presence of setaside fields negatively influenced aphid abundance due to their between-field isolation effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bird predation on gypsy moth Lymantria dispar L. (Lepidoptera Erebidae) egg masses may have a significant role in the gypsy moth population regulation; therefore the understanding of this process is a key issue to prevent large scale damage. In this paper, we aimed to quantify the winter predation of egg masses by birds and to reveal what factors affect its efficiency in three types of Central European hardwood forests. We detected a predation frequency of 20%, i.e. every fifth egg masses was destroyed at some extent by birds, while the mean percentage of removed surface per attacked egg masses was 35%. We measured the size of egg masses, their location on the trunk and environmental variables. Factors affecting predation frequency as well as the removed surface differed among forest stands characterized by different tree species composition. In beech dominated forest, egg masses located on the north and northeast side of trees were more frequently attacked than egg masses located in any other directions. In hornbeam forests, the predation frequency increased with the height on the trunk, while in Turkey oak forests, only the size of egg masses had a significant positive effect on egg mass predation rate. Egg mass size also affected the percentage of removed surface. Tree species, tree diameter and shrub cover had no significant effect on egg mass predation. Thus, we can conclude that egg mass predation is influenced rather by egg mass location or size than by other habitat characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlling herbivore insects by insectivorous birds is a major ecosystem service, nevertheless little is known about how local habitat features and forest management influence the efficiency of this service and about how the pest control service birds provide can be maintained and improved. We conducted an experiment in temperate oak forests in the Mátra Mountains, northern Hungary to measure bird predation rate of artificial caterpillars resembling winter moth (Operophtera brumata L.) larvae, to evaluate the relationships among insectivorous bird communities, caterpillar populations and leaf damage caused by caterpillars and to assess the effect of forest heterogeneity on these processes. We found, that structurally heterogeneous forests maintained a significantly higher abundance of insectivorous birds. Especially the tree size heterogeneity increased bird abundance. The rate of bird predation was positively related to the abundance of insectivorous birds as well as to caterpillar abundance, which indicates that birds were able to respond to caterpillar density. We were not able to demonstrate a direct negative effect of bird predation on caterpillar abundance and a positive effect of caterpillar abundance on leaf damage. Structurally heterogeneous forests, however, suffered from less leaf damage than did homogeneous forests, which result may indicates that the higher activity of insectivorous birds in heterogeneous stands resulted in lower activity of insect herbivores. Thus, we concluded that forest management can contribute to the mitigation of insect damages by maintaining the suitability of forest stands to the insectivorous bird communities through the maintenance of high stand heterogeneity and the presence of some key elements (e.g. retention tree groups, tree diversity, shrub layer). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]