Abstract
Vineyards are likely to be regionally important for wildlife, but we lack biodiversity studies in this agroecosystem which is undergoing a rapid management revolution. As vine cultivation is restricted to arid and warm climatic regions, biodiversity-friendly management would promote species typical of southern biomes. Vineyards are often intensively cultivated, mostly surrounded by few natural features and offering a fairly mineral appearance with little ground vegetation cover. Ground vegetation cover and composition may further strongly vary with respect to season, influencing patterns of habitat selection by ecological communities. We investigated season-specific bird-habitat associations to highlight the importance of semi-natural habitat features and vineyard ground vegetation cover throughout the year. Given that avian habitat selection varies according to taxa, guilds and spatial scale, we modelled bird-habitat associations in all months at two spatial scales using mixed effects regression models. At the landscape scale, birds were recorded along 10 1-km long transects in Southwestern Switzerland (February 2014 –January 2015). At the field scale, we compared the characteristics of visited and unvisited vineyard fields (hereafter called parcels). Bird abundance in vineyards tripled in winter compared to summer. Vineyards surrounded by a greater amount of hedges and small woods harboured higher bird abundance, species richness and diversity, especially during the winter season. Regarding ground vegetation, birds showed a season-specific habitat selection pattern, notably a marked preference for ground-vegetated parcels in winter and for intermediate vegetation cover in spring and summer. These season-specific preferences might be related to species-specific life histories: more insectivorous, ground-foraging species occur during the breeding season whereas granivores predominate in winter. These results highlight the importance of investigating habitat selection at different spatial scales and all along the annual cycle in order to draw practical, season-specific management recommendations for promoting avian biodiversity in farmland.
Highlights
To counteract ongoing farmland biodiversity erosion, a wealth of evidence-based knowledge has been gathered during the last decades about wildlife in agroecosystems
We studied which role marginal,natural habitats play for birds within the agricultural matrix
The remaining 5% of the grape production area are still subjected to herbicide application, but only partially, which typically offers a mosaic with ca 50% ground vegetation cover alternating with bare ground patches
Summary
To counteract ongoing farmland biodiversity erosion, a wealth of evidence-based knowledge has been gathered during the last decades about wildlife in agroecosystems. Restoring farmland biodiversity requires information on the ecological requirements of different species at multiple spatial and temporal scales to capture the dynamics and resource needs of entire communities [1,2]. To complete their life cycle, birds have to fulfil diverse resource requirements varying between and within seasons. Finding a suitable nesting place in close proximity to good foraging locations for provisioning food to chicks is a challenge commonly faced by parents during reproduction [1,3,4]. Douglas et al [10] found that the use of field margins as foraging grounds by yellowhammers Emberiza citrinella markedly declined with the progress of the season, whilst use of cereal fields augmented, probably as a consequence of impeded food accessibility due to a growing ground vegetation within the field margins
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