In the coordination of the SZTE research group, in the prestigious journal “Science of the Total Environment” a paper was accepted for publication presenting the temporal and spatial estimation of the ragweed pollen concentration for European stations.

Members of the research group: Prof. Dr. László Makra, PhD László G. Nyúl, PhD habil. Edit Mikó, Norbert Schneider, Bence Szabó, PhD Zoltán Sümeghy and PhD Áron József Deák. From our faculty, PhD habil. Edit Mikó Dean and Prof. Dr. László Makra, professor emeritus, are among the authors.

The topic of the thesis is ragweed and its extremely allergenic pollen, whose expansion due to ongoing and future climate change represents a serious human health problem throughout Europe and elsewhere. For this reason, there is an urgent need to produce accurate, temporally dynamic maps at the continental scale, especially in the context of climate uncertainty.

The aim of the study was to restore the missing daily ragweed pollen data in the European station datasets and to produce maps of the quantitative and phenological characteristics of ragweed pollen.

To this end, the authors developed two statistical procedures to restore the missing daily ragweed pollen data sets. Quantitative and phenological maps made with data restored by using these two methods were compared with each other. These are the first published quantitative and phenological maps in the literature, and an additional novelty is that they contain an altitude correction to restore the missing daily pollen data. These maps took into account (i) the longest time series to date, (ii) used data from the most stations to date, (iii) are the most accurate maps to date, and (iv) were made using the most modern cartographic methods.

The production of these maps provides an opportunity to monitor the changes in pollen characteristics in connection with climate changes, helps to identify geographical regions with high pollen exposure, to define areas that are likely to become vulnerable in the future, to apply spatially expressed mitigation measures, and to prioritize the necessary interventions.

The parameters of the paper are as follows:

Makra, L., †Matyasovszky, I., Tusnády, G., Ziska, L.H., Hess, J.J., Nyúl, L.G., Chapman, D.S., Coviello, L., Gobbi, A., Jurman, G., Furlanello, C., Brunato, M., Damialis, A., Charalampopoulos, A., Müller-Schärer, H., Schneider, N., Szabó, B., Sümeghy, Z., Páldy, A., Magyar, D., Bergmann, K-C., Deák, Á.J., Mikó, E., Thibaudon, M., Oliver, G., Albertini, R., Bonini, M., Šikoparija, B., Radišić, P., Mitrović Josipović, M., Gehrig, R., Severova, E., Shalaboda, V., Stjepanović, B., Ianovici, N., Berger, U., Kofol Seliger, A., Rybníček, O., Myszkowska, D., Dąbrowska-Zapart, K., Majkowska-Wojciechowska, B., Weryszko-Chmielewska, E., Grewling, Ł., Rapiejko, P., Malkiewicz, M., Šaulienė, I., Prykhodo, O., Maleeva, A., Rodinkova, V., Palamarchuk, O., Ščevková, J., Bullock, J.M., 2023: A temporally and spatially explicit, data-driven estimation of airborne ragweed pollen concentrations across Europe. Science of the Total Environment