Assessing the impact of Entry Level Stewardship on lowland farmland birds in England

Abstract

Agri‐environment schemes (AES) are central to the conservation of Europe’s farmland biodiversity. The UK Government’s Public Service Agreement target seeks to reverse the decline of farmland birds in England by 2020 through the use of AES. The Entry Level Stewardship (ELS) scheme, introduced in 2005, is the first non‐competitive, broad‐uptake stewardship scheme designed to deliver simple but effective environmental management on farms throughout England. Approximately 5 million hectares of farmland are currently entered into Environmental Stewardship (ES) agreements, and given the scale of this investment it is important to verify the efficacy of ELS as a mechanism for delivering biodiversity benefits. We used spatially referenced ES agreement data to assess the influence of specific management options and combinations of options on farmland bird population changes between 2005 and 2008 derived from standardized surveys carried out on over 2000 lowland farmland 1‐km squares in England. The results showed only limited evidence for short‐term effects of ES. Only Corn Bunting Emberiza calandra and Common Starling Sturnus vulgaris showed some landscape‐specific positive associations with area under ELS management. There was also limited evidence for positive associations between specific management options and the population changes of the species at which they were aimed. The current pattern of option uptake may be limiting benefits of ELS, with boundary management accounting for over 50% of scheme compensation value. However, the time required for option maturation and the time lags in bird population responses to environmental change mean that it is too early to reach definitive conclusions about the success or failure of the scheme. The findings of this study will assist in the development of ELS by feeding into the 5‐year review scheduled for 2010 and have implications for the development of similar schemes elsewhere in Europe.

Intersection between biodiversity conservation, agroecology, and ecosystem services

“…Thus, a shared goal of agroecology and conservation should be to sustain ecological management of farms, while generating positive conservation and biodiversity outcomes. European governments have officially recognized the value for conservation of agricultural landscapes through agrienvironmental schemes (Davey et al 2010;Kleijn et al 2006), where, among others, incentives are provided to farmers in order to increase onfarm plant diversity and perennial plant cover. Agricultural intensification has been justified by the urgency to increase food production in the face of rapid human population growth, yet there is growing evidence that diverse agricultural landscapes are more productive than homogeneous ones (Jordan and Warner 2010;Perfecto et al 2005;Tscharntke et al 2012b;Werling et al 2014).…”

The introduction of subsidies for grassland conservation in the Italian Alps coincided with population decline in a threatened grassland species, the CorncrakeCrex crex

“…Frequently they provide benefits to wild species (Davey et al 2010b), but often the design of such schemes has not been based on their potential effects on biodiversity, which may result in only partial benefits, or even negative effects on many species (Kleijn & Sutherland 2003, Birrer et al 2007, Davey et al 2010a, including some of conservation concern (Kleijn et al 2006). Agri-environmental schemes may not be sufficiently tuned to the ecological requirements of species (Kleijn et al 2004), and often fail to enhance population trends (O'Brien & Wilson 2011, Princé et al 2012.…”

Misapplied Ecology: Investigations Of Population Decline In The House Sparrow

“…Such results are generally explained away in the conservation literature as a result of difficulty in monitoring the impact of agri-environment schemes, of time lags in the response of bird populations, or as evidence of a need for better implementation and more research (Wilson et al 2009, Davey et al 2010. However, the fact that schemes implemented in the UK are designed around the results of studies of the relationship of agriculture to biodiversity (Grice et al 2004) raises the possibility that the causes of bird declines in particular have been wrongly deduced from such studies.…”