Lowland Farmland Birds 3 - abstract - Siriwardena & Anderson

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THE IMPORTANCE OF SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL SCALE FOR AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL SCHEME DELIVERY

Full paper

Gavin Siriwardena*1 & Guy Anderson2

1 British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk, IP24 2PU, UK

2 The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire, SG19 2DL, UK

* Email: gavin.siriwardena@bto.org

To be effective in helping farmland bird population recovery, AES options must plug key resource gaps throughout the year and do so throughout the target species’ range. Moreover, these ranges of provision have to be achieved within the financial limits of agri-environment funding. For most granivorous species, the available evidence indicates that the principal resource gap is winter food availability, but breeding resources will also have to be made sufficient to cater for populations benefiting from the winter measures so that such benefits can translate into breeding season abundance.

Recent landscape-scale experiments provide information both on resource requirements of farmland birds through the winter and on movement propensities within the winter and between wintering and breeding locations. The use of supplementary food by farmland birds through the winter provided an index of the unmet demand for ambient food resources, while radio-tracked movements revealed movement patterns within winter and breeding season resighting of winter-ringed birds revealed inter-seasonal movements. These results have important implications for the effectiveness of resource supplementation via agri-environment schemes, which will be reviewed briefly along with other sources of evidence for the importance of spatial and temporal scale in the delivery of agri-environment benefits for farmland birds. This review will consider, for example, requirements for spatially juxtaposed habitat features and intra-seasonal variation in the resources provided by particular AES options.

The available evidence will then be synthesized to produce recommendations for effective agri-environment option delivery.

Gavin Siriwardena studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Leicester, specialising in bird behaviour and ecology, and has worked in the field of farmland bird ecology at the BTO for nearly 13 years. This research has comprised field and data analytical research projects and he has published regularly in journals such as the Journal of Applied Ecology and Ibis. He is currently Head of Land-Use Research at the BTO and is working on projects including modelling farmland bird habitat relationships, agri-environment scheme evaluation and measuring effects of the loss of set-aside.

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