Zsolt Molnár

Motto: „I'm researching ecology not from books, but from nature.”

Zsolt Molnár, botanist, ethno-ecologist, PhD, founder and head of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge research group of the HUN-REN Ecological Research Centre. He was a member of the IPBES Indigenous and Local Knowledge Working Group (2014-2023) and coordinating lead author of the IPBES Global Assessment (2016-2019). He is one of the main organizers of the International Year of Pastoralists and Herders 2026 in Hungary and a member of its international working groups. Her main research interests are traditional and local ecological knowledge of pastoralists and farmers in Hungary, Transylvania, Serbia, Mongolia, Iran and Kenya. Her main approach is collaborative research and knowledge sharing with local people to prevent and resolve conservation conflicts and to support traditional landscape management, for example through conservation management based on traditional uses, agricultural regulation and policy rethinking.

The film below shows how we work with pastors:

This article is an overview of our methodology and methods:
Molnár, Zs., & Babai, D. (2021). Inviting ecologists to deepen their understanding of traditional ecological knowledge. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 36: 679-690.