SUMMARYSemi-natural hay meadows are among the most biodiversity-rich terrestrial ecosystems, and are managed for conservation purposes in most of Europe, including Sweden. Romania has some of Europe's largest areas of grasslands still managed with traditional methods. Through interviews and field studies, current management practices were investigated in two Romanian villages, and compared with CAP-generated grassland management in Swedish hay meadows and historical Swedish management of grasslands. The study evaluated the effect of the eligibility criteria within both countries' National Rural Development Programmes (NRDPs) on different ecologically important components of hay meadow management. The success of Swedish management was measured by assessing population trends for 25 grassland plant species. Current management proved to be considerably more diverse in Romania than in Sweden, but historical Swedish management was similar to management in Romania. Both countries' NRDPs provide support for some management components, but create barriers against other components. The Romanian NRDP contained more barriers than the Swedish NRDP, yet Swedish management showed little success in preserving grassland plants. NRDPs should nourish the use of local and traditional knowledge in order to preserve biodiversity in semi-natural grasslands. There are major limitations in both countries' NRDPs.

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The traditional, low-input use of grassland in Central and Eastern Europe has provided high-quality food, clothing and manure for millennia. As an outcome of sustainable low-intensity agriculture, some rural areas have globally significant species richness. Traditional farming is still well preserved in several regions of the Carpathian Mountains. This is a unique opportunity to use the wisdom of our ancestors to keep grassland biodiversity for our descendants. We present a sampling methodology to survey traditionally managed grassland ecosystems holistically, including abiotic, biological and cultural phenomena, and reflect thus the multidimensionality of traditional farming. Our main objective was to reveal the connection between particular management practices and precisely measured plot plant diversity. Our motivation was to identify traditional farming approaches that result in both high biodiversity and sustainable grassland utilization in particular region, and confirm their impact also using statistical tests. The multitaxon vegetation sampling at seven spatial scales combined with soil analyses, detailed land-use information derived from interviews with the land parcel owners, satellite pictures and historical materials provide potentially valuable data for several scientific disciplines including syntaxonomy, plant ecology, environmental anthropology and ethnology. Examples of grassland management practices based on traditional ecological knowledge can serve as an inspiration for developing modern biodiversity conservation strategies applicable for rural regions. The database Grassland with Tradition is registered in Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD) with the identifier ID EU-00-032. To date it contains data from 31 study sites in 7 countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Ukraine). Syntaxonomic reference: Mucina et al. (2016).

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Abstract:The article is concerned with presenting the meanings and the dynamic of contemporary festive traditional garments in the region of Maramureş (northern Romania). Based on an empirical approach, it analyses the morphology of local clothing, describing the two types of costumes considered as traditional today: an older type, with all the component pieces homemade, and a newer type, using industrial fabric, bought in the local markets. As clothes bear meanings, and people create and use them in a variety of contexts, the study is exploring, also, the different meanings that garments acquire when used, such as how they contribute to expressing the public self of a person, but also how they are valued and presented as important local heritage.

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Semi-natural grasslands are hotspots of biodiversity in Europe and provide amounts of flower resources for pollinators. We present data on composition and spatial turnover of herb species and flower resources in and between semi-natural grasslands in Romania mown at different times during the growth season (early, intermediate, late). The data include herb species occurrences, their phenological stage, flower resources, and measures of spatial turnover of the species occurrences and flower resources based on Detrended Correspondence Analyses (DCA), in the start of August. The dataset is provided as supplementary material and associated with the research article “Traditional semi-natural grassland management with heterogeneous mowing times enhances flower resources for pollinators in agricultural landscapes” [1] Johansen et al.. See Johansen et al. for data interpretation.

Aims: Once widely used across Europe, grazing of hay meadows is now a rare agricultural practice that is mainly applied in rural regions with maintained traditional agriculture. In this review, we examine the knowledge on grazing hay meadows in the Carpathian Mountains, including its historical distribution, implementation and timing, potential impacts on grassland productivity and biodiversity, and implications for grassland conservation and restoration.