Woody plants in water‐limited ecosystems affect their environment on multiple scales: locally, natural stands can create islands of fertility for herb layer communities compared to open habitats, but afforestation has been shown to negatively affect regional water balance and productivity. Despite these contrasting observations, no coherent multiscale framework has been developed for the environmental effects of woody plants in water‐limited ecosystems. To link local and regional effects of woody species in a spatially explicit model, we simultaneously measured site conditions (microclimate, nutrient availability and topsoil moisture) and conditions of regional relevance (deeper soil moisture), in forests with different canopy types (long, intermediate and short annual lifetime) and adjacent grasslands in sandy drylands. All types of forests ameliorated site conditions compared to adjacent grasslands, although natural stands did so more effectively than managed ones. At the same time, all forests desiccated deeper soil layers during the vegetation period, and the longer the canopy lifetime, the more severe the desiccation in summer and more delayed the recharge after the active period of the canopy. We conclude that the site‐scale environmental amelioration brought about by woody species is bound to co‐occur with the desiccation of deeper soil layers, leading to deficient ground water recharge. This means that the cost of creating islands of fertility for sensitive herb layer organisms is an inevitable negative impact on regional water balance. The canopy type or management intensity of the forests affects the magnitude but not the direction of these effects. The outlined framework of the effects of woody species should be considered for the conservation, restoration or profit‐oriented use of forests as well as in forest‐based carbon sequestration and soil erosion control projects in water‐limited ecosystems.

In intensively used landscapes biodiversity is often restricted to fragmented habitats. Exploring the biodiversity potential of habitat fragments is essential in order to reveal their complementary role in maintaining landscape-scale biodiversity. We investigated the conservation potential of dry grassland fragments in the Great Hungarian Plain, i.e. patch-like habitats on ancient burial mounds and linear-shaped habitats in verges, and compared them to continuous grasslands. We focused on plant taxonomic diversity, species richness of specialists, generalists and weeds, and the phylogenetic diversity conserved in the habitats. Verges meshing the landscape are characterised by a small core area and high level of disturbance. Their species pool was more similar to grasslands than mounds due to the lack of dispersal limitations. They held high species richness of weeds and generalists and only few specialists. Verges preserved only a small proportion of the evolutionary history of specialists, which were evenly distributed between the clades. Isolated mounds are characterised by a small area, a high level of environmental heterogeneity, and a low level of disturbance. Steep slopes of species accumulation curves suggest that high environmental heterogeneity likely contributes to the high species richness of specialists on mounds. Mounds preserved the same amount of phylogenetic diversity represented by the branch-lengths as grasslands. Abundance-weighted evolutionary distinctiveness of specialists was more clustered in these habitats due to the special habitat conditions. For the protection of specialists in transformed landscapes it is essential to focus efforts on preserving both patch-like and linear grassland fragments containing additional components of biodiversity.

Nowadays, the buccal administration of mucoadhesive films is very promising. Our aim was to prepare ascorbic acid-containing chitosan films to study the properties and structures important for applicability and optimize the composition. During the formulation of mucoadhesive films, chitosan as the polymer basis of the film was used. Ascorbic acid, which provided the acidic pH, was used in different concentrations (2–5%). The films were formulated by the solvent casting method. The properties of films important for applicability were investigated, such as physical parameters, mucoadhesive force, surface free energy, and breaking strength. The fine structure of the films was analyzed by atomic force microscopy, and the free volume was analyzed by PALS, which can be important for drug release kinetics and the location of the drug in the film. The applicability of the optimized composition was also tested with two different types of active ingredients. The structure of the films was also analyzed by XRPD and FTIR. Ascorbic acid can be used well in chitosan films, where it can function as a permeation enhancer when reacting to chitosan, it is biodegradable, and can be applied in 2% of our studies.