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142 ANNA VARGA 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; PalädiKovacs 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
