The relationship of bird diversity to crop and non-crop heterogeneity in agricultural landscapes

Hiron, Matthew; Berg, Åke; Eggers, Sönke; Berggren, Åsa; Josefsson, Jonas; Pärt, Tomas

doi:10.1007/s10980-015-0226-0

Cited by 47 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…A high diversity of crops with different structure and seasonality is assumed to enable more farmland birds to find both spatially and temporally complementary resources for feeding and nesting within their home range (Vickery and Arlettaz 2012) and hence may compensate for simplified landscape heterogeneity. Accordingly, several studies find that crop diversity enhance bird diversity (Firbank et al 2008, Lindsay et al 2013, Josefsson et al 2017) but there are also examples of studies that have failed to find effects (Fahrig et al 2015, Hiron et al 2015. Our results partly corroborated the positive findings and especially, similar to Josefsson et al (2017), we found that effects was limited to homogeneous landscapes where availability of interstitial seminatural habitats is low.…”

Section: Benefits From Crop Compositionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…, Hiron et al. ). Our results partly corroborated the positive findings and especially, similar to Josefsson et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although not experimental sensu stricto, survey designs in which orthogonality and coverage of relevant land use predictors are taken into account can be viewed as pseudo-experimental and used to estimate the association between land use and presence and/or abundance of organisms (Pickett 1989, Fahrig et al 2011. It may also be easier to disentangle the impact of different factors using a spatial approach, since simultaneous temporal changes in managements tend to result in a lack of orthogonality between factors (Chamberlain et al 2000, Berg et al 2015. However, evaluations based on space-for-time substitutions may not be able to focus directly on interventions per se, because they are too rare (e.g., skylark plots in Sweden) or too ubiquitous (e.g., effects of cross-compliance system or "the greening of the CAP") to be analyzed alone, but may rather reveal information about the importance of different types of habitat and habitat heterogeneity to birds, that in turn may be targeted by the interventions.…”

Section: Gathering Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Estimating effects of arable land use intensity on farmland birds using joint species modeling

Stjernman

Sahlin

Olsson

et al. 2019

Ecological Applications

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Declines in European farmland birds over past decades have been attributed to the combined effects of agricultural intensification and abandonment. Consequently, aspirations to stop declines should focus attention on reversing these changes through voluntary or policy‐driven interventions. The design of such interventions should ideally be informed by scientific knowledge of which aspects of the transformation of agricultural landscapes have contributed to the farmland bird declines. Declines may be associated with loss of natural habitats or the intensification and homogenization of land use management on production land, and furthermore, these changes may interact. Here, we applied an orthogonal design exploiting spatial variation in land use in a major agricultural region of Sweden to seek evidence for benefits to farmland birds of reversing some of the intensifications on and among arable fields and whether effects are modified by the availability of seminatural habitats (pastures and field borders) in the landscape. We accounted for the potentially confounding effect of interactions between species by using a joint species distribution model explicitly controlling for additional variation and covariation among species. We found that interventions aimed specifically at land in production could provide benefits to farmland birds. Landscapes with a higher proportion leys or fallows and/or with a more diverse set of crops held higher abundances of most farmland birds. However, effects were only apparent in landscapes with low availability of seminatural habitats and were sometimes even negative in landscapes with high amounts of such habitats, demonstrating context dependence. Even if we found little evidence of interactions between species, the joint modeling approach provided several benefits. It allowed information to be shared between species making analyses robust to uncertainty due to low abundances and provided direct information about the mean and variability in effects of studied predictors among species. We also found that care needs to be taken regarding prior and distributional assumptions as the importance of species interactions might otherwise be overstated. We conclude that this approach is well suited for evaluating agricultural policies by providing evidence for or against certain interventions or to be linked to policy scenarios of land use change.

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Section: Benefits From Crop Compositionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…, Hiron et al. ). Our results partly corroborated the positive findings and especially, similar to Josefsson et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Gathering Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Estimating effects of arable land use intensity on farmland birds using joint species modeling

Stjernman

Sahlin

Olsson

et al. 2019

Ecological Applications

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show abstract

“…Unfortunately, a lack of detailed information on spatial coverage of measures prevented us from distinguishing between these alternative explanations here. Furthermore, the effects shown here most probably reflect local habitat selection, where higher densities in response to measures are the result of birds aggregating from surrounding poorer habitats (Hiron et al., ). Effects of interventions may also be demographic (with positive effects on juvenile production or overwinter survival).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…As response variables, we used farm‐scale species richness and abundance of two trait‐based groups: (a) field‐nesting bird species that nest and forage in fields, and (b) non‐crop nesting bird species that forage both within agricultural fields and non‐crop habitat, but rely largely on non‐crop elements for nesting (see Tables and ; cf. Hiron et al., and Josefsson, Berg, Hiron, Pärt & Eggers, ). For the most commonly occurring species, we also considered individual‐species models.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

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

Josefsson

Pärt

Berg

et al. 2018

Journal of Applied Ecology

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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.

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Combined effects of landscape composition and heterogeneity on farmland avian diversity

Santana

Reino

Stoate

et al. 2017

Ecology and Evolution

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Conserving biodiversity on farmland is an essential element of worldwide efforts for reversing the global biodiversity decline. Common approaches involve improving the natural component of the landscape by increasing the amount of natural and seminatural habitats (e.g., hedgerows, woodlots, and ponds) or improving the production component of the landscape by increasing the amount of biodiversity‐friendly crops. Because these approaches may negatively impact on economic output, it was suggested that an alternative might be to enhance the diversity (compositional heterogeneity) or the spatial complexity (configurational heterogeneity) of land cover types, without necessarily changing composition. Here, we develop a case study to evaluate these ideas, examining whether managing landscape composition or heterogeneity, or both, would be required to achieve conservation benefits on avian diversity in open Mediterranean farmland. We surveyed birds in farmland landscapes of southern Portugal, before (1995–1997) and after (2010–2012) the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform of 2003, and related spatial and temporal variation in bird species richness to variables describing the composition, and the compositional and configurational heterogeneity, of the natural and production components of the landscape. We found that the composition of the production component had the strongest effects on avian diversity, with a particularly marked effect on the richness of farmland and steppe bird species. Composition of the natural component was also influential, mainly affecting the richness of woodland/shrubland species. Although there were some effects of compositional and configurational heterogeneity, these were much weaker and inconsistent than those of landscape composition. Overall, we suggest that conservation efforts in our area should focus primarily on the composition of the production component, by striving to maximize the prevalence of biodiversity‐friendly crops. This recommendation probably applies to other areas such as ours, where a range of species of conservation concern is strongly associated with crop habitats.

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The relationship of bird diversity to crop and non-crop heterogeneity in agricultural landscapes

Cited by 47 publications

References 45 publications

Estimating effects of arable land use intensity on farmland birds using joint species modeling

Estimating effects of arable land use intensity on farmland birds using joint species modeling

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

Combined effects of landscape composition and heterogeneity on farmland avian diversity

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