Authors: Nikolić, Tijana; Tarčak, Sonja;Lugonja, Predrag;Marković, Miljana; Brdar, Sanja;

The loss of agrobiodiversity due to agricultural intensification led to designation and implementation of environmentally friendly measures such as EU agri-environment schemes (AES). While in Serbia there are designated un-managed areas and Zones of conservation importance there are no AES to combat continual diminishment of species and their habitats in agricultural settings. Here, we took a set of landscape elements recognized as surrogates to EU agri-environment measures and examined their importance for 4 selected species present in highly productive Bačka region. We estimated the effect of these semi-natural elements on species habitat suitability, the spatial scale at which the surrogates are most effective and distribution of habitat suitability to propose adequate conservation measures within designated conservation areas and Zones. We used high resolution land use/cover data (10x10m), multi-scale ensemble SDM and species data. Our results show that the effects vary across species. The most beneficial measures in combination with grassland presence are grassland maintenance, linear elements, and crop diversity at local and landscape scale. Since the effects vary across species and scales, we need to diversify agricultural landscape through adequate spatial targeting and farmers-collaboration to ensure varied mix of habitat types and agricultural practices in existing conservation areas and Zones.