Mosaic-Level Inference of the Impact of Land Cover Changes in Agricultural Landscapes on Biodiversity: A Case-Study with a Threatened Grassland Bird

Abstract

Changes in land use/land cover are a major driver of biodiversity change in the Mediterranean region. Understanding how animal populations respond to these landscape changes often requires using landscape mosaics as the unit of investigation, but few previous studies have measured both response and explanatory variables at the land mosaic level. Here, we used a “whole-landscape” approach to assess the influence of regional variation in the land cover composition of 81 farmland mosaics (mean area of 2900 ha) on the population density of a threatened bird, the little bustard ( Tetrax tetrax ), in southern Portugal. Results showed that ca. 50% of the regional variability in the density of little bustards could be explained by three variables summarising the land cover composition and diversity in the studied mosaics. Little bustard breeding males attained higher population density in land mosaics with a low land cover diversity, with less forests, and dominated by grasslands. Land mosaic composition gradients showed that agricultural intensification was not reflected in a loss of land cover diversity, as in many other regions of Europe. On the contrary, it led to the introduction of new land cover types in homogenous farmland, which increased land cover diversity but reduced overall landscape suitability for the species. Based on these results, the impact of recent land cover changes in Europe on the little bustard populations is evaluated.

Mixed Effects of Long‐Term Conservation Investment in Natura 2000 Farmland

“…Although the effects observed were relatively weak, this was probably a consequence of the generalist sampling design used in here, as other, more directed studies have demonstrated stronger positive effects (Pinto et al 2005;Catry et al 2009;Moreira et al 2012). Positive trends were probably a consequence of targeted LIFE, including the purchase and management of critical areas, and the improvement of breeding and foraging habitats (Pinto et al 2005;Catry et al 2009;Moreira et al 2012).…”

“…Results might also reflect unusual idiosyncrasies of the study areas, such as poor SPA management, or the emergence of conservation-oriented farming in the control. This is also unlikely, because the SPA was comparable to other Iberian cereal steppes and the most threatened species showed largely favorable trends (Pinto et al 2005;Catry et al 2009;Moreira et al 2012; this study), while the control was a typical irrigated area undergoing agricultural intensification (Stoate et al 2000). Also, building of a highway in the middle of the study period might have influenced bird trends (López-Jamar et al 2011), but this is unlikely because it affected both the SPA and the control, and there were no measurable effects on very sensitive species such as Otis tarda.…”

Modelling the Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Portugal: A Multi-Scale and Multi-Temporal Approach

“…in these approaches, the factors at the origin of the largest land use and land cover changes (LUCC) are the most important for the observed negative impacts (e.g., water erosion due to forest losses, catastrophic phenomena such as floods that are related to increases in impermeable surfaces, and reductions in surface water quality) (fearnside, 1995;Hansen, stehman, & Potapov, 2010;schoene & Bernier, 2012). studies of LUCC are essential to the understanding of many presently observed phenomena, especially climate changes (Li et al, 2017;tasser, Leitinger, & tappeiner, 2017), biological (Moreira et al, 2012;song & Deng, 2017) and environmental perturbations (Kim et al, 2017), landscape fragmentation (nurwanda, Zain, & rustiadi, 2016), human health impacts (Patz & Olson, 2017) and the growth of urban areas (Du & Huang, 2017), among others.…”

“…Other LUCC studies on the Portuguese territory have been developed by other authors in past years. for example: Moreira et al (2012) evaluated the impacts of LUCC on the biodiversity of agricultural landscapes in four alentejo regions; freire, santos and tenedório (2009) studied recent urbanization and LUCC in Portugal, emphasizing the influence of coastlines and coastal urban centres; and abrantes, fontes, Gomes and rocha (2016) studied the compliance of land cover changes with municipal land use planning in the Lisbon region.…”

Freezing heat: thermally imposed constraints on the daily activity patterns of a free‐ranging grassland bird

“…In Iberia it is widely distributed, and reaches its highest known densities in the grasslands of Alentejo, in southern Portugal (Moreira et al 2012). …”