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receive and use it. As regards conservation, one of the centrally important group
of recipients are the rangers, officials of national parks and other conservation
specialists (Lewis 1989: 940; Robinson — Wallington 2012; Varga et al. 2017b),
about whose expertise, including traditional ecological knowledge, hardly any
information is available (see: Babai — Molnar 2013; Oteros-Rozas et al. 2013;
Hernändez-Morcillo et al. 2014).
In Hungarian ethnography and ecology, there were precedents of research into
the traditional knowledge of nature, but the term and concept of traditional
ecological knowledge were introduced to the special field of ecology by Zsolt
Molnär and his colleagues. In earlier periods, all that is and can be understood
today by traditional ecological knowledge was earlier discussed as natural historical
knowledge, animal and plant knowledge, or elements of vernacular religion, folk
tales or traditional modes of transmitting knowledge (e.g. Herman 1914; Palädi¬
Kovacs 1979; Takács 1980; Péntek — Szabó T. 1985; Paládi-Kovács 2001;
Andrásfalvy 2007). Later, studies of ecological anthropology increasingly placed
the issues of the relationship between natural scientific phenomena and society in
the foreground (Borsos 2004; Babai 2021).
Among ecologists in Hungary, the issue of TEK began gaining strength in the
early 2000s upon the initiative and guidance of ecologist Dr. Zsolt Molnár; it has
been given a place in the Iraditional Ecological Knowledge Research Group of
the Ecological Research Center of ELKH (formerly HAS Research Institute)
(Molnár et al. 2009; Zs. Molnár — Babai 2021). Through its active international