Abandoned farmlands hold potential for the preservation of wetland and grassland birds as rehabilitation zones.
Abandoned farmlands hold potential for the preservation of wetland and grassland birds as rehabilitation zones.
Agriculture and conversion of pristine lands into urban or industrial areas have exerted immense pressure on the natural biota due to habitat destruction and fragmentation in industrialized countries around the world. But since the 1900s, farmlands have been increasingly abandoned due to the decline in domestic agriculture and, in some countries, a decline in population. This yields an opportunity for abandoned farmlands to be used as rehabilitation zones for grassland, wetland, and forest animals. However, it has so far remained unclear how valuable for sustaining specific animal communities farmlands, abandoned farmlands, and natural habitats are relative to each other.
Hokkaido University’s Futoshi Nakamura and his collaborators including Yuichi Yamaura of Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, studied bird species distribution over an area in central Hokkaido, Japan. The group then correlated abundance and species richness of different bird communities with different degrees of farmland abandonment and the landscape structure. Mapped back onto the landscape of the known composition, this allowed them to evaluate the potential to conserve different bird communities if existing farmlands in a given area were to be abandoned.
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Image: Abandoned wet farmland in central Hokkaido in Japan. (Credit: Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute and Hokkaido University)
