Bird communities in agricultural landscapes: What are the current drivers of temporal trends?

AbstractAimEvaluating conservation effectiveness is essential to protect at-risk species and to maximize the limited resources available to land managers. Over 60% of North American grassland and aridlands have been lost since the 1800s. Birds in these habitats are among the most imperiled in North America, yet most remaining habitats are unprotected. Despite the need to measure impact, conservation efforts on private and working lands are rarely evaluated, due in part to limited availability of suitable methods.LocationNorthern Great PlainsMethodsWe developed a novel metric to evaluate grassland and aridland bird community response to habitat management practices, the Bird-Friendliness Index (BFI), consisting of density estimates of grassland and aridland birds weighted by conservation need and a functional diversity metric to incorporate resiliency. We used the BFI to inform three assessments: 1) a spatial prioritization to identify ecologically significant areas for grassland and aridland birds, 2) estimation of temporal trends in grassland and aridland bird community resilience, and 3) evaluation of the effects of land management practices on grassland and aridland bird communities.ResultsThe most resilient bird communities were found in the Prairie Potholes region of Alberta, Saskatchewan, northern Montana, and North Dakota, and the lowest BFI values in the southern and western regions of the Northern Great Plains. BFI values varied little over time on average, but trends varied regionally, largely in response to interannual relative variability in grassland and aridland bird densities.Main conclusionsBFI values increased in response to simulated habitat management, suggesting that practices recommended for use in bird-friendly grassland habitat management plans will increase the abundance and resilience of the grassland and aridland bird community, and will be detected using the BFI. The BFI is a tool by which conservationists and managers can carry out accountable conservation now and into the future.

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Low effect of young afforestations on bird communities inhabiting heterogeneous Mediterranean cropland

PeerJ ◽

10.7717/peerj.1453 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

pp. e1453 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Juan S. Sánchez-Oliver ◽

José M. Rey Benayas ◽

Luis M. Carrascal

Keyword(s):

Species Richness ◽

Agricultural Landscapes ◽

Bird Communities ◽

Tree Plantations ◽

Conservation Value ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Positive Effects ◽

High Conservation ◽

Conservation Concern ◽

The One

Afforestation programs such as the one promoted by the EU Common Agricultural Policy have spread tree plantations on former cropland. These afforestations attract generalist forest and ubiquitous species but may cause severe damage to open habitat species, especially birds of high conservation value. We investigated the effects of young (<20 yr) tree plantations dominated by pineP. halepensison bird communities inhabiting the adjacent open farmland habitat in central Spain. We hypothesize that pine plantations located at shorter distances from open fields and with larger surface would affect species richness and conservation value of bird communities. Regression models controlling for the influence of land use types around plantations revealed positive effects of higher distance to pine plantation edge on community species richness in winter, and negative effects on an index of conservation concern (SPEC) during the breeding season. However, plantation area did not have any effect on species richness or community conservation value. Our results indicate that the effects of pine afforestation on bird communities inhabiting Mediterranean cropland are diluted by heterogeneous agricultural landscapes.

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Distributions of birds in lowland agricultural landscapes of England and Wales: How distinctive are bird communities of hedgerows and woodland?

Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment ◽

10.1016/s0167-8809(00)00194-8 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 84 (1) ◽

pp. 79-92 ◽

Cited By ~ 45

Author(s):

R.J Fuller ◽

D.E Chamberlain ◽

N.H.K Burton ◽

S.J Gough

Keyword(s):

Agricultural Landscapes ◽

Bird Communities ◽

England And Wales

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Bird communities as bioindicators: The focal species concept in agricultural landscapes

Ecological Indicators ◽

10.1016/j.ecolind.2005.08.006 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 83-93 ◽

Cited By ~ 53

Author(s):

Emilio Padoa-Schioppa ◽

Marco Baietto ◽

Renato Massa ◽

Luciana Bottoni

Keyword(s):

Species Concept ◽

Agricultural Landscapes ◽

Bird Communities ◽

Focal Species

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Multiyear monitoring of bird communities in chlorpyrifos‐treated orchards in Spain and the United Kingdom: Spatial and temporal trends in species composition, abundance, and site fidelity

Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry ◽

10.1002/etc.4317 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 38 (3) ◽

pp. 616-629 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ralf Dittrich ◽

Benedikt Giessing ◽

María M. Benito ◽

Anja Russ ◽

Christian Wolf ◽

...

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Species Composition ◽

Site Fidelity ◽

Temporal Trends ◽

Bird Communities ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Spatial And Temporal Trends

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Evaluating the Relationships of Inter-Annual Farmland Vegetation Dynamics with Biodiversity Using Multi-Spatial and Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Data

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs12091479 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (9) ◽

pp. 1479

Author(s):

Niloofar Alavi ◽

Douglas King

Keyword(s):

Remote Sensing ◽

Time Series ◽

Vegetation Dynamics ◽

Vegetation Index ◽

Time Series Data ◽

Temporal Trends ◽

Agricultural Landscapes ◽

Natural Vegetation ◽

Series Data ◽

Positive Trend

Agricultural landscapes are highly dynamic ecosystems, but the effects of temporal farmland vegetation dynamics on species diversity have not been widely studied. In 93 sample farm landscapes in eastern Ontario, Canada, biodiversity data for seven taxa were collected in 2011 and 2012, prior to the initiation of this study. The goal of this study was to determine if trends and variability in vegetation productivity detected in these sample landscapes using long-term archived moderate and coarse resolution remote sensing time series data are related to the measured biodiversity. Mid-summer Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) (2000–2011) and Landsat 5 (1985–2011) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data were used with the Thiel–Sen slope and Contextual Mann–Kendall trend analysis to identify pixels showing significant trends. NDVI temporal metrics included 1) the percentage of pixels in each landscape with a significant negative or positive trend, and 2) the temporal coefficient of variation (CV) of both the mean and spatial CV of landscape NDVI. Larger areas of significant positive NDVI trends were found in the sample landscapes than negative trends, the former being associated with agricultural intensification or crop changes and the latter with smaller areas of natural vegetation removal. Landsat better-detected changes in individual fields or small areas of natural vegetation due to its much smaller pixel size. In addition, the longer Landsat time series showed a change in the NDVI trend from positive (1985–2000) to negative or a leveling off (2000–2011) for many pixels. In biodiversity modeling, the Landsat temporal CV of NDVI was negatively correlated with 2011–2012 plant and beetle diversity, while plant biodiversity was positively correlated with the percentage of pixels in a sample landscape showing a significantly positive NDVI trend. No significant relationships were found using the MODIS data. This study shows that temporal trends and variability in farmland vegetation density derived from Landsat data are related to biodiversity for certain taxa and that such relationships should be considered along with the more commonly studied spatial landscape attributes in evaluating landscape-level impacts of farming on biodiversity.

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Land-use change to subsistence farming has negligible impact on birds in Zimbabwe

10.22541/au.163255515.55214290/v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

J Stephen Pringle ◽

Ngoni Chiweshe ◽

Martin Dallimer

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Land Use Change ◽

Temporal Trends ◽

Bird Species ◽

Bird Communities ◽

Habitat Modification ◽

Small Scale ◽

Feeding Guilds ◽

Human Populations ◽

Habitat Transformation

Habitat alterations that often accompany land-use change are one of the major drivers of global biodiversity losses. In Africa, these threats are especially severe, as this continent has the most rapidly growing of all human populations. Inevitably, increasing areas of land are being transformed for agriculture, including drought-prone drylands in southern and central Africa, despite often having poor soils. In Zimbabwe, a land reform programme provided a unique opportunity to study the biodiversity response to abrupt habitat modification in an extensive dryland area of mixed grassland and woodland savannah. Small-scale subsistence farms were created rapidly during 2001-2002 in formerly semi-natural savannah. We measured the changing compositions of bird communities in transformed and untransformed land over an 8-year period, commencing one decade after subsistence farms were established. Over the study period, repeated counts were made along identical transects in order to assess species’ population changes that may have resulted from trait-filtering responses to habitat disturbance. We recorded significantly increased abundances in both land-use areas, accompanied by increases in species diversity and functional redundancy. Temporal trends showed increased abundances across all feeding guilds, and in species of virtually all sizes. Influxes of new species did not increase functional traits’ diversity, and no species with distinctive traits appear to have been lost as a result of land-use change. Nearly two decades after habitat transformation, the bird communities in the transformed and untransformed areas had become more similar in composition. The broadly benign impact on birds of land conversion into subsistence farms is attributed to the relatively low-level of human activities and disturbance in the transformed land, and the large regional pool of non-specialist bird species.

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