Sammanfattning

1. 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.2. 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.3. 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.4. 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.5. 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.6. 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.

Nyckelord

agri-environmental schemes; biodiversity; collaborative conservation; farmers; farmland birds; landscape composition; organic farming; unsubsidised conservation

Publicerad i

Journal of Applied Ecology
2018, Volym: 55, nummer: 6, sidor: 2719-2730
Utgivare: WILEY

SLU författare

• Josefsson, Jonas

  • Institutionen för ekologi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

• Pärt, Tomas

  • Institutionen för ekologi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

• Berg, Åke

  • Institutionen för stad och land, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

• Eggers, Sönke

  • Institutionen för ekologi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

Associerade SLU-program

SLU Centrum för biologisk mångfald, CBM


Globala målen

SDG15 Skydda, återställa och främja ett hållbart nyttjande av landbaserade ekosystem, hållbart bruka skogar, bekämpa ökenspridning, hejda och vrida tillbaka markförstöringen samt hejda förlusten av biologisk mångfald


UKÄ forskningsämne

Ekologi


Publikationens identifierare

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13184

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/96910