Authors: Babai, Dániel; Jánó, Béla;Molnár, Zsolt;

Micro-scale management of cultural landscapes with species-rich grasslands requires the operation of extensive land-use systems. These systems are under increasing pressure of interacting drivers that impact on farmers’ individual decisions and force them to make trade-offs. We aimed to reveal the local understanding of driver interactions and related trade-offs focusing the time of haymaking, through participatory observation and semi-structured interviews in a small-scale community in a mountainous landscape (Gyimes, Romania). Local farmers perceived ecological, socio-cultural, economic, and political drivers affected the optimal and actual time of mowing and increased the number of trade-offs. Direct drivers influenced the phenology of vegetation and thus the time of mowing, while indirect social, cultural, and political drivers only impacted on the latter. The complexity of driver and trade-off interactions increased making adaptation more difficult. While farmers were navigating through the increased complexity, an informal social institution that previously optimized the work forces of farms gradually disappeared, thus decreased the economic and social viability of the system. Our results suggest that the local community’s adaptive capacity has been drastically weakened. More flexible regulations are needed to assure the continuity of centuries-old but still existing traditional management systems, which maintain high-nature-value cultural landscapes.