Artificial light and urban ecology: what can we do for animal and plant species? Real light laboratories

People living in urban areas got used to the encreasing presence of ALAN (artificial lighting at night), but it has also led to a significant increase in light pollution of the night sky during the past decades. This process has negative effects on verterbrate animals, humans, invertebrate populations, pollination and plant species. A Hungarian research project has been collected data for the effects of modern LED light and the different types of them and try to include knowledge elements into adult and school education . Questionnaires, monitoring data and the complete exchange of the street lights of a village can give good examples for studying this urban ecology topic. The cool white LED light has strong effect on invertebrates as well as for vascular plants and insect- plant interacions which has been examined in protected areas in Hungary and also in laboratory. The results show that technology has been developped very quikly and people has only a little knowledge about the effect of light pollution. The research was supported by the EU project EFOP-3.6.2-16-2017-00014 "Development of an international research environment in the field of light pollution testing’