Landscape context and farm uptake limit effects of bird conservation in the Swedish Volunteer & Farmer Alliance

Abstract

In Europe, agri‐environmental schemes (AES) have been unsuccessful in halting biodiversity declines to any great extent. Two shortcomings of AES include the low farm uptake and the modest efficacy of many AES options. Partly in response to these shortcomings, initiatives encouraging farmers to take an active role in biodiversity conservation have gained in popularity. However, almost no evaluations of such initiatives exist. We evaluated uptake of conservation advice on farms in the Swedish Volunteer & Farmer Alliance, a BirdLife Sweden‐coordinated project aimed at farmland bird conservation, and the response of farmland birds to those actions using farm‐level survey data, in a before‐after implementation assessment. Uptake was higher for unsubsidised (i.e. non‐AES) measures than for AES options, and depended mainly on farmers’ interest in nature, with farm size and production type having less importance. In general, abundances of non‐crop nesting and field‐nesting bird species declined between inventory years (median interval 3 years). Decreases were more marked in agriculturally marginal regions than in more arable‐dominated regions, and declines were stronger on organic than on conventional farms. Negative abundance trends among non‐crop nesting species were reduced by an increasing number of conservation measures at the farm, but only in the more arable‐dominated landscapes. Changes in field‐nesting species, or at species level, did not significantly relate to implemented measures, but the power to detect such effects was generally small due to the small sample size of high‐uptake farms as well as high inter‐farm variability. Synthesis and applications. Our results suggest that volunteer farmer alliances and the addition of unsubsidised measures may be successful in changing the local number of non‐crop nesting farmland birds, at the farm level, particularly in intensively managed agricultural landscapes. Thus, unsubsidised measures can be a useful addition to the set of agri‐environment tools, although their effects on breeding bird numbers are (as with agri‐environmental schemes) dependent on landscape context, as well as on ensuring high on‐farm uptake of different interventions.

Relating national levels of crop damage to the abundance of large grazing birds: Implications for management

“…A possible way to increase the spatiotemporal resolution of data may be to include opportunistic citizen science data or to include observers in new bird monitoring programs in relation to crop protection. Such effort is also compatible with an increased cooperation with farmers, to build upon trust and to increase the understanding of attitudes and effectiveness for managing conservation conflicts (Josefsson, Pärt, Berg, Lokhorst, & Eggers, 2018;Mishra, Young, Fiechter, Rutherford, & Redpath, 2017;Young et al, 2016). Where there are possibilities to receive economical compensation for crop damage (as in Sweden), farmers should be actively encouraged to report damages together with, for example, participation in citizen science-based monitoring of large grazing birds promoted by local conservation organizations.…”

Conservation and Management of Agricultural Landscapes through Expert-Supported Participatory Processes: The “Declarations of Public Interest” in an Italian Province

“…Aimar et al (2021) also recognized the need for involving local stakeholders to "better support the management of land-use changes, also involving local farmers directly to reconstruct site-specific land-use maps" [35] (p. 460). Furthermore, the interdisciplinary contributions of history [36], geography [37], anthropology [38], sociology [39], semiology [40], psychology [41], art [42], agronomy [43], botany [44], zoology [45], landscape ecology [46], pedology [47], geology [48], climatology [49], economics [50], and planning [51], among others, contribute to the effectiveness of an integrated management for heritage sites. In recent decades, these disciplines have gained the adjectives "sustainable" and/or "resilient" with respect to their operational status in terms of strategies, objectives, and actions related to landscape and territory.…”

Within-scale and cross-scale interaction effects of temperature and human socioeconomic conditions on avian abundance

“…We computed 85% confidence intervals for regression coefficients because they are more consistent with AIC c -based model selection (Arnold 2010) than are other (e.g., 90% or 95%) confidence intervals. If a confidence interval for a regression coefficient did not include zero, the variable was considered to be informative (Josefsson et al 2018). We calculated VIFs to identify the degree of association among explanatory variables in the best-supported model.…”