His research interests include the taxonomy and distribution conditions of mosses, tropical ecology, and the flora of southwestern Transdanubia and the Southern Carpathians.

His great-grandfather Ferenc Kozma [hu] (1844–1920) was a teacher, publicist, and academic; his sister Éva Pócs (born 1936) is a folklore researcher.

He attended the Reformation Secondary School, where one of his teachers, the scientist Zoltán Nyárády, encouraged his early interest in botany.

[3] Some of his early collections from Bükk, Mátra, Mecsek, South Zala, and Vendvidék are still kept at the Hungarian Natural History Museum.

[2] He chose instead to accept employment at the herbarium of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, where he worked until 1962.

In 1978 he transferred to the Botanical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Vácrátót (starting in 1984, it was called the Ecological and Botanical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences),[3] where he worked as a scientific advisor and later was appointed head of the botany department.

He also taught the course Botany of Tropical Cultivated Plants at Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Science in Gödöllő.

These expeditions occurred in Madagascar, the Seychelles, the Comoros, Réunion, Mauritius and the Rogriguez islands, and resulted in the collection of thousands of new specimens for the moss herbarium and the discovery of many new species.

After the political changes in Eastern Europe, scientists were free to travel abroad, and these conferences were discontinued because they outlived their original purpose.

His name is associated with, among other things, several Tanzanian regions, such as the full and complex ecological study and mapping of the vegetation of the Uluguru Mountains.

Pócs was the first to show the role of tropical mosses in the spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation water, which is one of his most significant achievements.

[2] In 1969 Pócs won a competitive position as a teacher at the newly established Tanzanian Agricultural University in Morogoro, at the foot of the forested Uluguru Mountains.

In addition to his tropical research, he examined the loess walls of Hungary on the basis of coenological and ecological aspects.

Pócs was the first to study the relationship between the epiphytic biomass and precipitation capacity of tropical rainforests, the results of which are among the most cited publications today.

To summarize, it has been shown by quantitative methods that the biomass of epiphytic cover crops (moss, lichen, fern, other plants) living in the tree can reach 14 tons per hectare in this type of vegetation, which can absorb 50,000 liters of water per four times its dry matter, and be gradually transferred to its environment.

Furthermore, his research showed that epiphytes retain significant amounts of water from the regular fog precipitation in the cloud zone.

His colleague Jiří Váňa [cz] described him as "an open-hearted, generous man, a disciplined, energetic researcher, and a scientist of the highest caliber".