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The European temperate forest zone has great importance, in terms of maintaining the habitats of not only forests but also anthropogenous grasslands, which were formed as a result of habitat reconstruction. These habitats have great importance, by means of nature conservation, landscape use, economy, and forest and grassland use. The mosaic-like habitat complexes that consist of these grasslands and forest patches help to increase biodiversity and supply the habitat for forest game. In this survey, changes in the vegetation of the temperate forests (Fagetum) of the Mátra Mountains of Hungary were investigated after reconstruction. In 2012, shrub cutting was carried out in the area of Parádóhuta, and then three different management methods (abandoning, mowing, and grazing) were utilized. Our goals were the following: to perform a vegetation survey of the sample areas (i); surveying the natural regeneration of the grassland and analyzing its biodiversity, nature conservation, and economical value (ii); and analyzing the vegetation in terms of nature conservation and valuing its life form spectrum, economy values, and livestock-feeding ability (iii). According to our results, systematic mowing and a less-intensive grazing had a significantly positive effect on biodiversity and the coverage of species, thus increasing the naturalness of the studied grassland habitats, while wild game were able to act as ecological engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity responses to climatic factors in plant communities are well understood from experiments, but less known in natural conditions due to the rarity of appropriate long-term observational data. In this paper, we use long-term transect data sampled annually in three natural grasslands of different species pools, soils, landscape contexts and land use histories. Analyzing these specific belt transect data of contiguous small sampling units enabled us to explore scale dependence and spatial synchrony of diversity patterns within and among sites. The 14-year study period covered several droughts, including one extreme event between 2011 and 2012. We demonstrated that all natural grasslands responded to droughts by considerable fluctuations of diversity, but, overall, they remained stable. The plant functional group of annuals showed high resilience at all sites, while perennials were resistant to droughts. Our results were robust to changing spatial scales of observations, and we also demonstrated that within-site spatial synchrony could be used as a sensitive indicator of external climatic effects. We propose the broad application of high-resolution belt transects for powerful and adaptive vegetation monitoring in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]