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Climate change impact assessment with regards to the potential natural vegetation of Hungary and the role of the Balkan vegetation-environment patterns in the assessment

Potential natural vegetation (PNV) expresses the site potential for vegetation types regarding self-sustainability without active human management. Multiple PNV (MPNV) provides further details by assessing this potential as a probability distribution of vegetation types. MPNV models for Hungary have been developed by gradient boosting to establish preference relationships between the abiotic background and observed distribution of vegetation types. Through updating climate conditions within the abiotic background in the models they also offer the opportunity to assess future MPNV under climate change scenarios. Differences between contemporary and future MPNV reveal the expected impact. Our existing assessment already reveals significant changes in potential vegetation type distributions. However, climate change introduces environmental conditions suitable for vegetation types currently not present in Hungary, training the model within the boundaries of Hungary only becomes insufficient. Therefore, we started to extend the training area to include vegetation- environment relationships from the southern neighbourhood. As a foundation to this we initiated studies of model transferability in the southern Pannonian region. The project will provide improved basis for the prediction of expected climate change impact within Hungary and allow the first steps of impact assessment in the southern countries.

climate change, impact assessment, MPNV, predictive vegetation maps, training area

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