A The Hungarian Hydrological Society is a civil, scientific and professional association. It was formed to deal with hydrology and its related sciences—the sciences and field, which deal with the water. The Alkaline Water Working Group was formed on 14th of May 2008 within the Limnology Section of the Hungarian Hydrology Society. The Working Group would like to provide opportunity for the coordination of the activities of experts dealing with sodic water research, monitoring (long-term surveillance), and protection in practice,  for their co-operation as well as for their representation of interest nationally and internationally.

The president of the Section:

Dr Péter Bíró
member of the MTA (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

Founding coordinators of Working Group:

Lajos Vörös, DSc
Scientific advisor

Emil Boros, PhD
Scientific expert

 

Foundation members:

Éva Ács, Árpád Berczik, Emil Boros, Andrea Borsodi, György Dévai, Mária Dinka, László Forró, Szilvia Gőri, Béla Kiss, Attila Molnár, Zsolt Nagy László, Balázs Németh, Attila Pellinger, Raskóné Mária Nagy, Katalin Sipos, Boglárka Somogyi, András Szabó, János Tardy, Tibor Tóth, Katalin V.Balogh, Zoltán Vajda, Lajos Vörös, Rozália Érdiné Szekeres.

As a consequence of the natural conditions and intellectual resources of Hungary the research of alkaline waters of Hungary reaches back to many years. At the beginning, the need for the research of the special traits of alkaline lakes were formulated due to the expected  utilisation of this resource. Nowadays, however, these wetlands are considered rather like scientific and nature conservation assets instead. Pannonic sodic areas are considered as unique, threatened habitats of priority interest within the European Union. This fact gives new tasks and new challenges to science and nature conservation alike.
Several institutes are carrying out research related to sodic areas already—which is also expected internationally from Hungary.  Though the protection of sodic wetlands within the EU is well defined legally, moreover, they are specially protected in Hungary, there is still a long way to go for the technically proper implementation of national law and community level directives. The Working Group was formulated to give a boost to all this and to coordinate all the work ahead.