Potential Impact of EU Accession on Common Farmland Bird Populations in Hungary

Abstract

Abstract. The accession of Hungary to the European Union is likely to result in the intensification of arable crop cultivation. As a result of market forces and rural development measures, small parcels of land will be consolidated into larger fields. It is also likely that the area of maize and oilseed rape, and to a lesser extent that of sunflower, will increase at the expense of cereals. Abandoned land, ineligible for area payments will probably not return to cultivation. To identify the potential impact of these changes on the populations of common farmland birds, we analysed the data from 680 homogeneous sample plots of the Hungarian Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (MMM) from 2003. We used pair-wise comparisons with the Mann-Whitney test to identify the difference in the index of abundance of 34 species amongst the following categories of crops: abandoned versus cultivated arable land, small parcels versus large fields, cereals versus maize, sunflower and oilseed rape, fallow land versus small or large...