Dataset Information

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

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Stjernman M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6850359 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

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

Stjernman Martin M Sahlin Ullrika U Olsson Ola O Smith Henrik G HG

Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America 20190315 4

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 ma ...[more]

PMID: 30761672

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Project description:Climate and land use changes are key drivers of current biodiversity trends, but interactions between these drivers are poorly modeled, even though they could amplify or mitigate negative impacts of climate change. Here, we attempt to predict the impacts of different agricultural change scenarios on common breeding birds within farmland included in the potential future climatic suitable areas for these species. We used the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) to integrate likely changes in species climatic suitability, based on species distribution models, and changes in area of farmland, based on the IMAGE model, inside future climatic suitable areas. We also developed six farmland cover scenarios, based on expert opinion, which cover a wide spectrum of potential changes in livestock farming and cropping patterns by 2050. We ran generalized linear mixed models to calibrate the effects of farmland cover and climate change on bird specific abundance within 386 small agricultural regions. We used model outputs to predict potential changes in bird populations on the basis of predicted changes in regional farmland cover, in area of farmland and in species climatic suitability. We then examined the species sensitivity according to their habitat requirements. A scenario based on extensification of agricultural systems (i.e., low-intensity agriculture) showed the greatest potential to reduce reverse current declines in breeding birds. To meet ecological requirements of a larger number of species, agricultural policies accounting for regional disparities and landscape structure appear more efficient than global policies uniformly implemented at national scale. Interestingly, we also found evidence that farmland cover changes can mitigate the negative effect of climate change. Here, we confirm that there is a potential for countering negative effects of climate change by adaptive management of landscape. We argue that such studies will help inform sustainable agricultural policies for the future.

Project description:Agricultural intensification has led to drastic population declines in Europe's arable plant vegetation, and continuous monitoring is a prerequisite for assessing measures to increase and conserve remnant populations of endangered arable plant species. Unfortunately, strong variation in plot sizes and in-field locations makes comparison of current arable plant monitoring approaches difficult. This study compares different relevé approaches in conventionally managed arable fields in Northwest German farmland with respect to plant species detection success and time expenditure. We compared species detection rate and expenditure of time of six different relevé types in 45 conventionally managed arable fields (each 15 fields of wheat, maize, and rapeseed): field "Interior" plots (50 × 2 m); field edge plots: "Edge_30" (30 × 2 m), "Edge_50" (50 × 2 m), and "Edge_500" (500 × 1 m); "Subplots" (four dispersed plots of 5 × 1 m); and "Corner" plots (50 × 2 m). To determine species detection rate, the species richness recorded with a survey method was related to the field's total plant species number as estimated from a survey of the entire field edge zone. With a species detection rate of 8.3% (median), interior plots were inadequate for characterizing the field's arable plant vegetation. Edge_500 plots yielded the highest proportion of the field's arable plant species pool (75.6%, including taxa of conservation value), followed by "Corner" plots (45.8%) and "Sublots" (32.6%). Edge_50 and Edge_30 plots detected less than 25% of the field's species pool. The average time needed for a relevé was 20 min in Edge500 plots and 5-11 min in the other plot types. We suggest implementing Edge_500 plots as a standard monitoring approach in conventionally managed farmland due to its favorable ratio of detection success to expenditure of time. Our findings should be compared to methodological studies conducted in other regions, in different farmland management systems, and in landscapes of variable complexities.

Dataset Information

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

Publications

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

Similar Datasets

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