Impact of landscape improvement by agri-environment scheme options on densities of characteristic farmland bird species and brown hare (Lepus europaeus)

Biodiversity at the farm scale: A novel credit point system

“…In contrast to (high-quality) ECAs, however, proportions of SNEs are not readily available but have to be mapped, which is time-consuming and has to be done by experts. It has been repeatedly shown that the amount of semi-natural habitat is a good predictor of species richness and density, especially in differently intensive used farmland (Billeter et al, 2008;Meichtry-Stier et al, 2014), and this was confirmed in our study. SNEs and high-quality ECAs both fulfil specific criteria of habitat quality (Schweizerischer Bundesrat, 2001) which are distinctly higher than those of general ECAs.…”

“…without. The weighting is based on results of studies addressing (i) the monitoring of AES (Kleijn et al, 2004;Knop et al, 2006;Pywell et al, 2006;Birrer et al, 2007;Meichtry-Stier et al, 2014), (ii) farming intensity (Mäder et al, 2002;Pfiffner and Luka, 2003;Hole et al, 2005;Billeter et al, 2008;Kleijn et al, 2009), (iii) landscape and habitat heterogeneity (Benton et al, 2003), (iv) nature conservation measures for (endangered) target species (Morris et al, 2004;Evans and Green, 2007), (v) own data sets, and is supplemented by expert knowledge (Smallshire et al, 2004;Schmitzberger et al, 2005). At the end, the CPS returns one single total point score for each farm.…”

Effects of breeding habitat and field margins on the reproductive performance of Skylarks (Alauda arvensis) on intensive farmland

“…In the United Kingdom, the abundance of Skylarks was positively correlated with the area of uncropped land on a farm, especially with uncropped patches with large perimeter-to-area ratios (Henderson et al 2012). In both the UK and Switzerland, however, Skylark abundance and population growth rates did not positively correlate with the surface area of field margins (Baker et al 2012;Meichtry-Stier et al 2014).…”

Moving Window Abundance – A method to characterise the abundance dynamics of farmland birds: The example of Skylark (Alauda arvensis)

“…Unfortunately, the application of these methods is not standardised; therefore, the processes used to determine the number and temporal distribution of field surveys or covariables used to document crop species distributions and vegetation development are highly variable. Currently, one to five (sometimes up to eight) surveys are conducted within the breeding period and one to three observations of territorial behaviour are considered to be sufficient for assigning a numerical value to characterise the abundance for the entire breeding season (e.g., Berthold et al, 1980;Bibby et al, 2000;Fischer et al, 2005;Meichtry-Stier et al, 2014). Such methods utilise the unit "territories per area" (area size is usually 10 or 100 ha) (e.g., Bauer et al, 2005); however, these methods provide limited abundance information that may only represent a narrow time window of the possible variability in the abundance related to the breeding season.…”