Biodiversity can be crucial for an ecosystem to uphold its’ functions. Thus, is population declines a major threat to biodiversity. One type of species-rich habitat linked to several ecosystem services is the Swedish pasture. Albeit during the latter half of the 20th-century observations could be made of many population declines in several species of farmland birds. The population decline is directly linked to intensification of arable lands due to method modernization, conversion of pastures to fields and pesticide use. This study focused on comparing the fauna of birds in pasture lands surrounded by forest-dominated or cropland-dominated areas within a 500 m radius of a semi-natural pasture. 100plots were extracted (50 of each land use) for analysis. Data was provided by voluntarily collected stocktaking from the environmental surveillance program Svensk Fågeltaxering. A CCA was made on the species composition with amounts of forest and amounts of fields as variables. The effect on species richness from land use was calculated using GLM. The result showed no difference between bird species richness or species composition between forest-dominated pastures and cropland dominated pastures. This could indicate that birds are no longer affected by the intensification of modern arable farming or that local habitat elements like hedges and ditches are structures more critical factors for nesting farmland birds than land use within a 500 m radius surrounding pastures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-148867 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Pettersson, Anna |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för fysik, kemi och biologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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