Bird‐friendly wine country through diversified vineyards

Abstract

Vinecology, the integration of ecological and viticultural practices, focuses on the working landscapes of the Mediterranean‐climate biomes to make wine‐grape production compatible with species conservation. We examined how maintaining remnant native vegetation and surrounding natural areas in and around vineyards, two primary practices of vinecology, may influence bird community richness and composition across a vineyard landscape. We conducted bird surveys over spring and summer (October–January) at 120 sites across a wine‐grape growing region in central Chile. The sites were equally divided across vineyards with and without remnant native vegetation, and sites had varying amounts of adjacent natural land cover. We used generalized linear mixed models to examine individual species responses to remnant vegetation in the vineyard at plot scale (within a 50‐m radius) in the surrounding natural area (within a 500–1000 m radius). We used the Horn similarity index to explore overall community differences to quantify variations in endemic species, guild detection levels, and species richness between site types. At the plot scale, 9 out of 30 species were positively associated with the proportion of remnant vegetation and 3 species were negatively associated. Six were positively influenced by the proportion of native vegetation in the surrounding landscape and 3 species were negatively associated with proportion of native vegetation. Although overall total detections and richness were significantly greater in continuous mixed Mediterranean forest, 84.9% of these species were also detected in forest remnants within vineyards. Endemics, insectivores, granivores, and omnivores were all more abundant in vineyards with remnant native vegetation than in vineyards without remnant native vegetation. Our results show the value of maintaining and restoring natural vegetation remnants in vineyards as a tool for bird conservation that can be applied in working landscapes of the New World Mediterranean climate regions.

Organic management and landscape heterogeneity combine to sustain multifunctional bird communities in European vineyards

“…Interestingly, we found that both configurational and compositional landscape heterogeneity were important for the conservation of functionally diverse bird communities in vineyards, as predicted by ecological theory (Fahrig et al, 2011). Such positive responses to heterogeneity are due to higher spatial complexity in mosaic landscapes, enhancing positive edge effects on insectivorous birds and their functional diversity, and allowing more complementation processes and spill-over movements between vineyards and adjacent semi-natural habitats (Barbaro et al, 2017;Muñoz-Sáez et al, 2020). Overall, landscape heterogeneity had a positive effect on taxonomic diversity and allowed the coexistence of multiple avian functions in vineyard landscapes.…”

“…Organic farming benefits are thus enhanced by higher diversity and interspersion of semi-natural habitat patches in the landscape (Assandri et al, 2016;Rollan et al, 2019). Our results suggest that it is critical to also maintain a significant proportion of native vegetation within and between organic vineyards to integrate production and conservation efforts in sustainable viticulture (Froidevaux et al, 2017;Muñoz-Sáez et al, 2020). Management options mixing organic farming at the stand level and maintenance of semi-natural cover in the landscape are not only profitable to birds of conservation concern (Arlettaz et al, 2012;Brambilla, Gustin, et al, 2017), but also to the diversity of avian functions (Assandri et al, 2016;Barbaro et al, 2017;Lourenço et al, 2021).…”

“…This would help in building regional strategies to design multifunctional landscapes aiming to conciliate biodiversity conservation and wine production. In other words, vineyards need biodiversity to cope with global change and contribute to the conservation of associated bird communities under Mediterranean-type climates (Muñoz-Sáez et al, 2020;Paiola et al, 2020). A further step would be now to assess how the spatial expansion of agroecological farming practices in interaction with semi-natural habitats is affecting bundles of ecosystem functions and services in European vineyards, including cultural significance or aesthetic values.…”

“…Birds provide multiple ecosystem services to viticulture, including biological control of insects and weeds (Whelan et al, 2015), as well as cultural values (Brambilla, Ilahiane, et al, 2017;Cumming & Maciejewski, 2017). As a result, conserving functionally diverse bird assemblages in vineyards is becoming critical, given the social and economic importance of this permanent crop production under Mediterranean-type climates (Muñoz-Sáez et al, 2020;Paiola et al, 2020).…”

“…Vineyard bird assemblages are highly dependent on multi-level habitat heterogeneity created by both inter-row management of grass and bare ground cover (Duarte et al, 2014;Guyot et al, 2017) and semi-natural habitat diversity at the landscape level (Assandri et al, 2016;Muñoz-Sáez et al, 2020). Organic farming and extensive grass cover can benefit birds through higher availability of food resources (weeds and arthropods) or nesting sites (Fuller et al, 2005;Winqvist et al, 2011), while higher landscape heterogeneity increases complementation between key resources distributed over the entire landscape matrix (Dunning et al, 1992).…”