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Regionally differentiated effects of agricultural land-use change on farmland birds in Lower Saxony
Project
Project code: TI-BD-08-PID1656
Contract period: 01.12.2014
- 30.09.2016
Purpose of research: Inventory & Assessment
The populations of farmland birds declined during the last decades. In our project we will relate changes in agricultural land-use to population trends of common breeding farmland birds. Our research project will contribute to identify regions that are characterized by increasing, stable or decreasing breeding bird populations. Farmland birds depend on agricultural fields, grassland or landscape elements like hedges. Over the last few decades particularly common farmland birds have undergone population declines. These declines were mainly attributed to changes in farming practices and a decrease in landscape features such as hedgerows. However, the strength of the link between changes in both agricultural land-use and populations of farmland birds is relatively unknown. In order to gain a deeper understanding of population trends and their causes, detailed spatial and temporal data on agricultural land-use and landscape structure is needed. Our project aims at analysing changes in farmland bird populations and their drivers using detailed spatial information on agricultural land-use (IACS data) and monitoring data of common breeding birds in Lower Saxony, Germany. Our analyses will contribute to characterize and identify regions within Lower Saxony that show decreasing, stable or increasing farmland bird populations. As a first step we will analyze temporal trends of parameters that describe type and intensity of agricultural land-use and are supposed to affect farmland birds. Regions in Lower Saxony are identified that can be characterized by the chosen variables of land-use change. In parallel, we calculate temporal trends of farmland birds on the monitoring sites that we link in the last step to the trends of land-use variables and identified regions.
Section overview
Subjects
- Wildlife Biology
- Agroecology
