My main research focuses on the environmental history of the Carpathian-Balkan Region during the last 30,000 years. Using pollen, plant macrofossil, and multi-proxy paleoecological methods I study how rapid climate change events and human impact have shaped the forest and steppe environment, what was the amplitude of climate change during the last glacial termination and what are the region’s climate change characteristics. Our studies also address questions connected to the protection of Hungary’s semi-natural landscapes, we seek baseline conditions in the lowland forest steppe environment prior to major human transformation of the land, study natural forest composition in the mid mountains and focus on Holocene land cover reconstruction, tree and timberline changes in the Carpathians, study the refugial role of the Carpathian Basin for temperate and boreal tree taxa during the Last Glacial Maximu,. We also apply novel ancient DNA techniques to reconstruct past vegetation from soils and lake sediments.

As part of our research, we analyze the sediments of both high mountain and lowland lakes that span the last 30,000 years. By extracting extracellular and cellular DNA, we investigate the species-level composition of past higher plant communities. For plants, we focus on a conserved region of the chloroplast DNA P6 loop. Using 80–120 base pair-long sequences, we perform genus- and species-level taxonomic identification and also quantitatively assess our data. This pioneering approach enables the reconstruction of past vegetation at the plant association level.

For mammals, we analyze residual DNA targeting the ribosomal 16S region, allowing species-level identification of past mammalian fauna, with particular emphasis on assessing the ecological impacts of grazing.