Disentangling the ecosystem service 'flood regulation': Mechanisms and relevant ecosystem condition characteristics.

Riverine floods cause increasingly severe damages to human settlements and infrastructure. Ecosystems have a natural capacity to decrease both severity and frequency of floods. Natural flood regulation processes along freshwaters can be attributed to two different mechanisms: flood prevention that takes place in the whole catchment and flood mitigation once the water has accumulated in the stream.

The effect of future land use changes on hydrologic ecosystem services: a case study from the Zala catchment, Hungary.

Maintaining and, where possible, improving the ecological status of our water resources are of particular importance for the future. So, one of the main drivers of landscape design must be to protect our waters. In this study, we carried out an evaluation of four hydrologic ecosystem services (HES) in the Zala River catchment area, the largest tributary of Lake Balaton (more than half of the lake's surface inflow comes from the Zala River), Hungary.

A spatially explicit analysis of wheat and maize yield sensitivity to changing groundwater levels in Hungary, 1961-2010.

Groundwater (GW) in many regions is essential for agricultural productivity, especially during drought periods. The shrinking of GW is an important but rarely documented component of the recent global environmental crisis and may threaten food security. The problem cannot be put in proper perspective, because we rarely have datasets long and detailed enough to scrutinise the unfolding effects at regional scales.