Population increase of forest birds in the Czech Republic between 1982 and 2003

Abstract

Land-use practices have changed markedly in the Czech Republic, and in other central and eastern European countries, during the 20th century (Lipský 1995, Sklenička 2002). In the last few decades in particular, changes in land-use have been accompanied by changes in the extent of all major landscape types. The amount of arable land has declined as fields in montane and submontane areas were abandoned after the Second World War, when three million people were translocated from areas near state borders (Sonka 2002). As a result, forests started to regenerate on these areas (Pokorný et al. 2005). At the same time, cattle grazing was prohibited within the forested areas and the rotation period increased (Konvička et al. 2004). Forest invasion was enhanced during the transformation of the Czech economy starting in 1989; subsidies in agriculture dropped to a minimum thus restricting arable land to highly productive areas (Sklenička 2002). All of these processes have contributed to the maturation of Czech forests during the last decades (Anon. 2005). Although such large environmental changes would be expected to have an effect on bird populations, large-scale studies of population changes in birds in central and eastern European countries are rather scarce. The explanatory power of existing small-scale studies (Wesołowski & Tomiałojc 1997, Stříteský & Krist 2004) is limited, and does not explain population changes of birds at larger spatial scales (Holmes & Sherry 1988). Moreover, results at regional and local

Changes in bird distribution in a Central European country between 1985–1989 and 2001–2003

“…These positive changes were also documented in Poland (Goławski 2006) and Hungary (Verhulst et al 2004). Moreover, forests, defoliated in extensive areas because of air pollution, started to recover (Anonymus 1996;Reif et al 2007Reif et al , 2008a. At the same time, we have failed to find any significant positive effect of legal protection on the occupancy of species.…”

“…Most of the species used for further analyses were already sorted into these categories in Reif et al (2006Reif et al ( , 2008b and Voříšek et al (2008). For the categorization of the remaining species, we used the following literature sources: Hudec (1983Hudec ( , 1994 and Hudec and Šťastný (2005) for the habitat requirements, anonymus (2008) for legal protection status and Hagemeijer and Blair (1997) for the breeding distribution in Europe.…”

Patterns in long-term changes of farmland bird populations in areas differing by agricultural management within an Eastern European country

“…Higher altitudes 1982-19901990-2000Trend change P 1982-19901990-2000 −6.0 ± 11.2 7.7 ± 10.4 13.7 0.17 11.9 ± 17.4 5.3 ± 9.0 −6.6 0.54 White Wagtail 0.7 ± 7.0 −6.9 ± 5.0 −7.6 0.14 0.8 ± 3.3 −5.7 ± 2.8 −6.5 0 .02 Wood Pigeon 6.1 ± 9.7 −0.9 ± 5.5 −7.0 0.26 −1.2 ± 0.5 3.7 ± 4.2 4.9 0.14 Yellowhammer −1.2 ± 3.8 1.6 ± 2.8 2.8 0.34 0.9 ± 2.1 −0.9 ± 1.6 −1.8 0.22 Table 6. Relationships between annual population growth rates of 24 farmland bird species and annual values of measures of agricultural management over the period 1982-2000 in (a) lowlands (regions up to 300 m a.s.l.)…”

“…and is thus not in focus of this study) with more extensive agricultural management (Anonymous 1966, Trnka et al 2009). Moreover, it is one of a few countries where a common bird monitoring scheme has been conducted for a long time period at numerous study sites enabling a test of the relationships between changes in the agriculture and farmland bird populations (Janda & Št'astný 1984, Reif et al 2006.…”

Effects of forest landscape change and management on the range expansion of forest bird species in the Mediterranean region

“…(2) Because most of the bird species in the Mediterranean forests have a non-Mediterranean origin and are typically associated with advanced forest stages (Blondel and Farré , 1988;Suá rez-Seoane et al, 2002), we expected afforestation to increase bird colonization (e.g., Reif et al, 2007;Gil-Tena et al, 2009) but to a lesser extent than maturation. (3) We also anticipated that changes in forest structure resulting from forest management practices would not prevent bird colonization because most of the forest bird species in the Mediterranean appear to be adapted to landscape heterogeneity derived from anthropogenic practices (Tellería and Santos, 1999;Santos et al, 2002;De La Montañ a et al, 2006;Robles et al, 2007).…”