Exploring the effects of habitat management on grassland biodiversity: A case study from northern Serbia

RESEARCH ARTICLE Exploring the effects of habitat management on grassland biodiversity: A case study from northern Serbia Dubravka MilićID1*, Milica Rat1, Bojana BokićID1, Sonja Mudri-Stojnić1, Nemanja Milosˇ evićID2, Natasˇ a Sukur2, Dusˇan Jakovetić2, Boris Radak1, Tamara Tot1, Dusˇ anka VujanovićID3, Goran Anačkov1, Dimitrije Radisˇ ićID1 1 Department of Biology and Ecology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2 Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia, 3 BioSense Institute, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia * dubravka.milic@dbe.uns.ac.rs Abstract Grasslands represent a biodiversity hotspot in the European agricultural landscape, their restoration is necessary and offers a great opportunity to mitigate or halt harmful processes. These measures require a comprehensive knowledge of historical landscape changes, but also adequate management strategies. The required data was gathered from the sand grasslands of northern Serbia, as this habitat is of high conservation priority. This area also has a long history of different habitat management approaches (grazing and mowing versus unmanaged), which has been documented over of the last two decades. This dataset enabled us to quantify the effects of different measures across multiple taxa (plants, insect pollinators, and birds). We linked the gathered data on plants, pollinators, and birds with habitat management measures. Our results show that, at the taxon level, the adopted man-

agement strategies were beneficial for species richness, abundance, and composition, as the highest diversity of plant, insect pollinator, and bird species was found in managed areas. Thus, an innovative modelling approach was adopted in this work to identify and explain the effects of management practices on changes in habitat communities. The find- ings yielded can be used in the decision making as well as development of new manage- ment programmes. We thus posit that, when restoring and establishing particular communities, priority needs to be given to species with a broad ecological response. We recommend using the decision tree as a suitable machine learning model for this purpose. Introduction As the natural vegetation of the forest-steppe biome in Central and Eastern Europe, Pannonian grasslands represent an important semi-natural habitat and biodiversity hotspot in the Euro- pean agricultural landscape [1, 2]. Since the Anthropocene, as a result of human activities (e.g. grazing, mowing, burning) grasslands have expanded across Europe [3, 4]. However, land use changes that culminated in the intensification of agriculture in 20th century, triggered the PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301391 March 28, 2024 1 / 19 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Milić D, Rat M, Bokić B, Mudri-Stojnić S, Milosˇević N, Sukur N, et al. (2024) Exploring the effects of habitat management on grassland biodiversity: A case study from northern Serbia. PLoS ONE 19(3): e0301391. https://doi.org/

10.1371/journal.pone.0301391 Editor: Tzen-Yuh Chiang, National Cheng Kung University, TAIWAN Received: August 16, 2023 Accepted: March 11, 2024 Published: March 28, 2024 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301391 Copyright: © 2024 Milić et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.