Impact of land cover and landfills on the breeding effect and nest occupancy of the white stork in Poland

Abstract

Food wastes are among the factors with the greatest effects on animal populations. The white stork is among bird species that clearly profit from feeding at landfills, at least in Western Europe and North Africa. However, the rate and the consequences of this feeding are still unknown in the Central-Eastern European population, which differs from the western population not only in terms of migration routes but also in the greater availability of suitable natural breeding habitats due to less intensified agriculture. The aim of the study was to describe the use of landfills and its consequences in terms of probability of nest occupation and breeding effects in different regions of Poland. Although the most important factors influencing nest-site selection and breeding effect are still habitat quality and weather conditions, distance to landfills is important in selection of nest sites. White storks use landfills most intensively late in the breeding season, independently of the density of breeding pairs. The results suggest that the use of landfills is not currently essential in the Central-Eastern European population of the white stork, does not affect breeding effect, and may be more frequent in non-breeders. However, this phenomenon is still developing and requires continuous monitoring.

White Storks nest at high densities near landfills changing stork nesting distributions in the last four decades in Central Spain

“…We selected the following environmental variables from Corine Land Cover (CLC, https://centrodedescargas.cnig.es) known to affect the distribution of breeding White Stork popu-lations (Carrascal et al 1993, Radović et al 2015, Orłowski et al 2019, Hmamouchi et al 2020a, Bialas et al 2021 we used distance to the nearest water body and degree of urbanization instead of percentage of water bodies (CLC classes 41 and 51) or percentage of highly altered urban areas (CLC class 1)…”

“…These land cover types were obtained by grouping the original Corine Land Cover classes based on previous accumulated knowledge on this species, following the methodology used in Bialas et al (2021). We calculated the percentage of each land cover type in each grid cell of 1 × 1 km.…”

Anthropogenic nest materials in two distinct populations of migratory bird in Europe.

“…By this research, we showed that anthropogenic nest material incorporation behaviour is also population speci c. Not only the anthropopressure of the environment where the bird nests is a dominant factor, but probably also the solitary or colonial breeding patterns and the land ll use (Bialas et al, 2021;López-García et al, 2021). Understanding this behaviour on a local, but also on a wider scale is crucial, as we are recently challenged with global pollution crisis.…”

“…Lack of such relationship in Polish population is probably connected to the nesting site preferences. Storks in Poland, although are known to use anthropogenic sources of food like land lls (Bialas et al, 2021) and incorporate anthropogenic nesting materials (Jagiello et al, 2018), they still nest mostly in rural habitats (Tobolka et al, 2013), which are rather homogenous in terms of human pressure. This is contrasting with the Spanish white stork population that nests in a gradient of human-altered environments, from the urban environments to natural parks and rural landscape.…”

Anthropogenic food subsidies reshape the migratory behaviour of a long-distance migrant

“…Although there is no information, to our knowledge, on the historical stopover use by white storks, this hypothesis is supported by the behaviour of white storks using the eastern European flyway. While in the east, the use of landfills is negligible (Bialas et al, 2021;Van den Bossche et al, 2002), in the western flyway storks stop for longer periods and have an intensive use of artificial stopovers. Here, we suggest that landfills J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f…”