Authors: Ivașcu, Cosmin; Iuga, Anamaria;Westin, Anna ;Lennartsson, Tommy;Biro, Alina;

European biodiversity is threatened by changed land-use, and a key conservation measure is to restore degraded habitats and improve habitat management. Targets for restoration and management are, however, often difficult to identify due to lack of sites with favorable conservation status. Studies of declining populations and degraded habitats may provide misleading information about what is the suitable habitat. It is therefore necessary to trace earlier, more favorable conditions, for example by using traditional ecological knowledge (Berkes et al. 2000, Roué and Molnár 2017) and historical knowledge in combination with ecological knowledge (Westin et al. 2018).
We present results from own interdisciplinary research in which Swedish threatened hay-meadows are compared with actively used meadows in Romania in order to identify management practices of key importance for biodiversity. We discuss the effects on threatened plant and insect species of mowing and grazing regimes in meadows, as well as temporary cultivation. Our paper also includes the use of reference landscapes, i.e. learning about traditional management and species in landscapes where they are still common, for conservation where they have become rare.