Grassland winners and arable land losers: The effects of post-totalitarian land use changes on long-term population trends of farmland birdse

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11310%2F16%3A10328363" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11310/16:10328363 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2016.08.007" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2016.08.007</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2016.08.007" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.agee.2016.08.007</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Grassland winners and arable land losers: The effects of post-totalitarian land use changes on long-term population trends of farmland birdse

Original language description

Biodiversity loss is an ongoing problem of European farmland and recent studies show that causes of this loss may vary among regions. At the same time, Eastern European post-totalitarian countries hold key part of farmland biodiversity within Europe but drivers of its changes remain poorly known due to lack of studies baed on long-term data from this region. To fill this gap in our knowledge, we investigate how the post-totalitarian transformation of agricultural management, resulting in widespread land abandonment, affected land cover composition and, in turn, long-term changes of farmland bird populations in an Eastern European former communist country, the Czech Republic. Besides intensification in the most productive areas, we hypothesized that two scenarios might occur: (i) loss of farmland area resulting from its transformation to forests, successional habitats or built areas, (ii) conversion of highly energy-demanding arable land to extensively managed grassland. CORINE land cover data supported the second scenario with a massive gain of grassland area at the expense of arable land, while changes in areas of forest and successional habitats were only slight. This land cover change corresponded well with population increase of grassland birds and population decline of arable land birds, whereas mean population change of species associated with shrub and trees habitat was close to zero. These patterns are quite Unique within biodiversity studies reporting declines of grassland bird species in North America and Western Europe, or shrub encroachment accompanied with increasing abundance of shrub-dwelling species in Southern Europe and South Africa. We suggest that the results found in the Czech Republic may also hold in other post-totalitarian Eastern European countries. Based on our findings, we recommend that the agri-environmental schemes applied in the Czech Republic, which focused mainly on grasslands and were only minimally represented on arable land.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_x - Unclassified - Peer-reviewed scientific article (Jimp, Jsc and Jost)

CEP classification

EG - Zoology

OECD FORD branch

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Project

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Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach<br>I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2016

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment

ISSN

0167-8809

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

223

Issue of the periodical within the volume

September 2016

Country of publishing house

NL - THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS

Number of pages

10

Pages from-to

208-217

UT code for WoS article

000384384900021

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-84989962824