Authors: Kovács-Hostyánszki, Anikó; Batáry, Péter;Kőrösi, Ádám;Orci, Kirill Márk;Somay, László;Soltész, Zoltán;Szigeti, Viktor;Báldi, András;

In the last two decades, Hungarian agricultural landscapes have faced new challenges and opportunities since the EU accession. While certain intensification processes endanger the comparably high biodiversity, agri-environment schemes (AES) are devoted to halting species loss and maintaining ecosystem services. Besides the horizontally available AES, special schemes are available regionally for e.g., protection of great bustard, red-footed falcon, or farmland birds in general. Some of these regional schemes require the withdrawal of a certain percent of arable fields from production for 1-3 years, turning them to sown set-aside fields, mown once per year. We conducted studies on the suitability of such set-aside fields for wild plants, different arthropod groups, farmland birds and showed their general benefits for grasshoppers and butterflies and increasing positive effects by set-aside age for wild plants and farmland birds. We also tested the landscape-scale effects of set-asides on wild bees, hoverflies, and predatory wasps and found that reproductive success of cavity-nesting bees and wasps was positively related to the presence of set-aside fields in the landscape and increased with their proportion. We conclude that set-aside fields in a mosaic agriculture landscape can be highly beneficial for biodiversity and are worth maintaining in future AES.