Aims: Baltic coastal meadows host unique plant communities that are threatened extensively by environmental change. We re-inventoried the occurrence of Baltic coastal meadow plant specialists after 60 years to examine their response to habitat loss and management continuity and assess large-scale shifts in Baltic coastal meadows plant communities. Ultimately, we aimed to understand what defines losing and winning species in Baltic coastal meadows after 60 years of environmental change.

Location: Swedish Baltic coast.

Methods: In 2024, we re-inventoried 65 Baltic coastal meadows that were originally inventoried in the 1960s, assessing the abundance of eight specialist plant species. We used aerial image interpretation to map all coastal meadows in the region in both time steps, estimating local and landscape-scale habitat extent for the focal meadows. We also determined management continuity in these meadows using all available imagery in between the 1960s and 2024. We explored how management continuity and local and landscape-scale changes in habitat extent affect specialist species occurrence and local extinctions.

Results: Coastal meadow habitat extent across the whole region has decreased by 21% and only 57% of the meadows inventoried in the 1960s are managed today. Six plant species have decreased significantly, of which two were not found at all in 2024. Three species have remained stable in continuously managed meadows, whereas five species have decreased despite continuous management. There were no significant relationships between habitat loss, at either local or landscape scale, and extinction/persistence patterns.

Conclusions: Coastal meadows have disappeared or become smaller in size over 60 years, and our results indicate an extinction debt already in the 1960s due to habitat loss before the original inventory. Baltic coastal meadows are under cross-fire by many drivers of environmental change, likely augmenting biodiversity loss through synergetic interactions. Management continuity is imperative for population persistence, and urgent large-scale restorations are needed to reverse negative biodiversity trends.