The project to write a dissertation at the Doctoral School of Landscape Architecture and Landscape Ecology of Szent István University aimed at (1) building a predictive ecological model for climax and subclimax habitats of Hungary; (2) studying the potential impact of the climate change of the 21st century on the habitats by evaluating the model predictions; (3) characterizing the environmental demands of the studied 31 important woody ornamental taxa based on their ability to be planted in the potential distribution of the climax and subclimax habitats; (4) modelling and analyzing the potential impact of climate change on the planting area of the selected ornamental taxa; (5) assessment of the likely changes in the application potential of the
selected taxa based on the results of the research.
The research was carried out by Ákos Bede-Fazekas, research assistant of MTA Centre for Ecological Research and supervised by Imelda Somodi, research fellow. Due to their high resource-intensity (both processor and memory), computations related to statistical downscaling climate data (Regression Kriging) and training correlative ecological model (Boosted Regression Trees) of 54 natural habitats were done in the virtual server of EcoInfLab, using R statistical software in Ubuntu Linux environment.