Coastal meadow management for threatened waders has a strong supporting impact on meadow plants and amphibians

Abstract

Wet grasslands provide unique habitats for several taxa and offer multiple ecosystem services. Their degradation is therefore of increasing concern in many parts of the world. Baltic coastal meadows, which host diverse plant and bird communities and provide an essential breeding ground for amphibians, belong to the most threatened habitat types in Europe. In spite of the EU agri-environmental schemes, the threatened wader and toad populations, characteristic to these meadows, have not recovered, suggesting that the management efforts are failing to provide sufficiently high habitat quality for these species. In this paper we report the results of a large-scale survey determining the factors that influence the patterns of breeding habitat selection of four Charadriiform bird species on 24 coastal meadows in Estonia. We also examined whether the habitat conditions required by the threatened waders would benefit breeding amphibians and meadow plants and whether the threatened waders might act as focal species for managing coastal meadow biodiversity. In total, we analysed 23 landscape-variables, applying co-inertia analysis to discover common multivariate patterns in coastal meadow characteristics, breeding waders, plants and amphibians. We demonstrated that large (≥100ha) and wide (mean width ≥200m) meadows with extensive grazing, high water-table and no woody vegetation provide favourable breeding conditions for waders of conservation concern, but at the same time also support other Charadriiform birds, larger amphibian populations, and more diverse plant communities. Meadow management should therefore be targeted at threatened waders, especially Baltic dunlin, which could be considered as a focal species, and focus on the establishment of large and wide meadow areas with extensive grazing.