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Power-line grids are increasingly expanding worldwide, as well as their negative impacts on avifauna, namely the direct mortality through collision and electrocution, the reduction of breeding performance, and the barrier effect. On the other hand, some bird species can apparently benefit from the presence of power lines, for example perching for hunting purposes or nesting on electricity towers. In this perspective essay, we reviewed the scientific literature on both costs and benefits for avifauna coexisting with power lines. Overall, we detected a generalized lack of studies focusing on these costs or benefits at a population level. We suggest that a switch in research approach to a larger spatio-temporal scale would greatly improve our knowledge about the actual effects of power lines on bird populations. This research approach would facilitate suitable landscape planning encompassing both mitigation of costs and promotion of benefits for bird populations coexisting with power lines. For example, the strategic route planning of electricity infrastructures would limit collision risk or barrier effects for threatened bird populations. Concurrently, this strategic route planning would promote the range expansion of threatened populations of other bird species, by providing nesting structures in treeless but potentially suitable landscapes. We suggest establishing a collaborative dialogue among the scientific community, governments, and electricity companies, with the aim to produce a win–win scenario in which both biodiversity conservation and infrastructure development are integrated in a common strategy. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-018-1025-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Food waste disposal represents a major global source of predictable anthropogenic food subsidies and is exploited by many organisms. However, the energetic cost-benefits of foraging on these food subsidies have remained largely unexplored. Here we investigate the year-round foraging decisions of resident white storks, Ciconia ciconia, in Iberia and assess the energetic and time cost-benefits of foraging on both landfill waste and natural food sources. To do so, we use GPS and acceleration data from 55 individuals tagged in southern Portugal between 2016 and 2019. We find that the probability of attending landfill sites was 60% during the non-breeding season and 44% during the breeding season. Moreover, foraging on landfill waste is a time- and energy-saving strategy; although birds had to travel 20% further to exploit this resource during the breeding period, they spent overall 10% less energy than when foraging on natural prey. We show that this relationship could be mediated by a reduction in foraging time and an increase in foraging efficiency while exploiting landfill waste. Surprisingly, we did not find any evidence that landfill specialists experienced any competitive advantage during landfill exploitation over birds that visit landfills occasionally. These insights are key to predict how species that rely on landfills can be affected by waste reduction initiatives planned by the European Union, and implement the necessary management strategies.

This study was funded by project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016664 (PTDC/AAG-REC/5007/2014), supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The study was also sponsored by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through projects PTDC/ AGR-AAM/102300/2008 (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-008701) and PTDC/BIA-BIC/2203/2012 (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-028289), under FEDER funds through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors – COMPETE and by National Funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, and grants to PFR (SFRH/BD/87530/ 2012) and JS (SFRH/BD/63566/2009). LR received support from the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science and the European Social Fund, through FCT, under POPH – QREN – Typology 4.1 (post-doc grants SFRH/BPD/62865/2009 and SFRH/BPD/93079/2013). PB was supported by EDP Biodiversity Chair. FM was supported by the REN Biodiversity Chair and FCT (IF/01053/2015) ; High Nature Value (HNV) farmland is declining in the EU, with negative consequences for biodiversity conservation. Agri-environment schemes implemented under the Common Agricultural Policy have addressed this problem, with recent proposals advocating direct support to HNV farming systems. However, research is lacking on the economics of HNV farming, which makes it difficult to set the level and type of support that ensure its sustainability. In this paper, we focused on a Special Protection Area for steppe bird conservation, analysing how economic incentives, biophysical and structural features govern the choice of farming system. We found that persistence of the traditional farming system important for steppe birds was associated with economic incentives, resistance to change, and good quality soils, whereas a shift to specialised livestock production systems was favoured by higher rainfall and less fragmented farms. A supply curve built using the choice model predicted that the proportion of traditional farming increased from 20% to 80% of the landscape, when economic incentives increased from about 100€/ha to 160€/ha. Overall, our study highlights the dependence of HNV farming systems on economic incentives, and provides a framework to assess the effects of alternative policy and market scenarios to sustain farmland landscapes promoting biodiversity conservation. ; authorsversion ; published

Conserving biodiversity on farmland is an essential element of worldwide efforts for reversing the global biodiversity decline. Common approaches involve improving the natural component of the landscape by increasing the amount of natural and seminatural habitats (e.g., hedgerows, woodlots, and ponds) or improving the production component of the landscape by increasing the amount of biodiversity-friendly crops. Because these approaches may negatively impact on economic output, it was suggested that an alternative might be to enhance the diversity (compositional heterogeneity) or the spatial complexity (configurational heterogeneity) of land cover types, without necessarily changing composition. Here, we develop a case study to evaluate these ideas, examining whether managing landscape composition or heterogeneity, or both, would be required to achieve conservation benefits on avian diversity in open Mediterranean farmland. We surveyed birds in farmland landscapes of southern Portugal, before (1995–1997) and after (2010–2012) the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform of 2003, and related spatial and temporal variation in bird species richness to variables describing the composition, and the compositional and configurational heterogeneity, of the natural and production components of the landscape. We found that the composition of the production component had the strongest effects on avian diversity, with a particularly marked effect on the richness of farmland and steppe bird species. Composition of the natural component was also influential, mainly affecting the richness of woodland/shrubland species. Although there were some effects of compositional and configurational heterogeneity, these were much weaker and inconsistent than those of landscape composition. Overall, we suggest that conservation efforts in our area should focus primarily on the composition of the production component, by striving to maximize the prevalence of biodiversity-friendly crops. This recommendation probably applies to other areas such as ours, where a range of species of conservation concern is strongly associated with crop habitats ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Conserving biodiversity on farmland is an essential element of worldwide efforts for reversing the global biodiversity decline. Common approaches involve improving the natural component of the landscape by increasing the amount of natural and seminatural habitats (e.g., hedgerows, woodlots, and ponds) or improving the production component of the landscape by increasing the amount of biodiversity-friendly crops. Because these approaches may negatively impact on economic output, it was suggested that an alternative might be to enhance the diversity (compositional heterogeneity) or the spatial complexity (configurational heterogeneity) of land cover types, without necessarily changing composition. Here, we develop a case study to evaluate these ideas, examining whether managing landscape composition or heterogeneity, or both, would be required to achieve conservation benefits on avian diversity in open Mediterranean farmland. We surveyed birds in farmland landscapes of southern Portugal, before (1995-1997) and after (2010-2012) the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform of 2003, and related spatial and temporal variation in bird species richness to variables describing the composition, and the compositional and configurational heterogeneity, of the natural and production components of the landscape. We found that the composition of the production component had the strongest effects on avian diversity, with a particularly marked effect on the richness of farmland and steppe bird species. Composition of the natural component was also influential, mainly affecting the richness of woodland/shrubland species. Although there were some effects of compositional and configurational heterogeneity, these were much weaker and inconsistent than those of landscape composition. Overall, we suggest that conservation efforts in our area should focus primarily on the composition of the production component, by striving to maximize the prevalence of biodiversity-friendly crops. This recommendation probably applies to other areas such as ours, where a range of species of conservation concern is strongly associated with crop habitats.

Conserving biodiversity on farmland is an essential element of worldwide efforts for reversing the global biodiversity decline. Common approaches involve improving the natural component of the landscape by increasing the amount of natural and seminatural habitats (e.g., hedgerows, woodlots, and ponds) or improving the production component of the landscape by increasing the amount of biodiversity‐friendly crops. Because these approaches may negatively impact on economic output, it was suggested that an alternative might be to enhance the diversity (compositional heterogeneity) or the spatial complexity (configurational heterogeneity) of land cover types, without necessarily changing composition. Here, we develop a case study to evaluate these ideas, examining whether managing landscape composition or heterogeneity, or both, would be required to achieve conservation benefits on avian diversity in open Mediterranean farmland. We surveyed birds in farmland landscapes of southern Portugal, before (1995–1997) and after (2010–2012) the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform of 2003, and related spatial and temporal variation in bird species richness to variables describing the composition, and the compositional and configurational heterogeneity, of the natural and production components of the landscape. We found that the composition of the production component had the strongest effects on avian diversity, with a particularly marked effect on the richness of farmland and steppe bird species. Composition of the natural component was also influential, mainly affecting the richness of woodland/shrubland species. Although there were some effects of compositional and configurational heterogeneity, these were much weaker and inconsistent than those of landscape composition. Overall, we suggest that conservation efforts in our area should focus primarily on the composition of the production component, by striving to maximize the prevalence of biodiversity‐friendly crops. This recommendation probably applies ...

Pest control services provided by naturally occurring species (the so-called biocontrol services) are widely recognized to provide key incentives for biodiversity conservation. This is particularly relevant for vertebrate-mediated biocontrol services as many vertebrate species are of conservation concern, with most of their decline associated to landscape modification for agricultural purposes. Yet, we still lack rigorous approaches evaluating landscape-level correlates of biocontrol potential by vertebrates over broad spatial extents to better inform land-use and management decisions. We performed a spatially-explicit interaction-based assessment of potential biocontrol services in Portugal, using 1853 pairwise trophic interactions between 78 flying vertebrate species (birds and bats) and 53 insect pests associated to two widespread and economically valuable crops in the Euro-Mediterranean region, olive groves (Olea europaea subsp. europaea) and vineyards (Vitis vinifera subsp. vinifera). The study area was framed using 1004 square cells, each 10 × 10 km in size. Potential biocontrol services were determined at all those 10 × 10 km grid-cells in which each crop was present as the proportion of the realized out of all potential pairwise interactions between vertebrates and pests. Landscape correlates of biocontrol potential were also explored. Our work suggests that both birds and bats can effectively provide biocontrol services in olive groves and vineyards as they prey many insect pest species associated to both crops. Moreover, it demonstrates that these potential services are impacted by landscape-scale features and that this impact is consistent when evaluated over broad spatial extents. Thus, biocontrol potential by vertebrates significantly increases with increasing amount of natural area, while decreases with increasing area devoted to target crops, particularly olive groves. Overall, our study highlights the suitability of our interaction-based approach to perform spatially-explicit assessments of potential biocontrol services by vertebrates at local spatial scales and suggest its utility for integrating biodiversity and ecosystem services in conservation planning over broad spatial extents. ; This work was supported by the projects ECOLIVES (PTDC/AAG-REC/6480/2014) and OLEAdapt (PTDC/ BIA-CBI/1365/2020) both funded by the Portuguese National Public Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, and the project SHOWCASE (ref. 862480) funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme from the European Union. and the project NORTE 01-0246-FEDER-000063, funded by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE2020),under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) JMH and FM were supported, respectively, by the contracts IF/00001/2015 and IF/01053/2015 funded by the FCT. JRP was supported by 'la Caixa' and 'Caja Navarra' Foundations, under agreement LCF/PR/PR13/51080004 in the framework of UPNA's 'Captación de Talento' program. BS, GJ-N, SV and RM were supported, respectively, by the PhD studentships SFRH/BD/137803/2018, SFRH/BD/133017/2017, SFRH/BD/121388/2016 and SFRH/BD/99746/2014 funded by the FCT.

This study was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under projects NETPERSIST (PTDC/AAG-MAA/3227/2012) and MATEFRAG (PTDC/BIA-BIC/6582/2014). APF was supported by FCT grant SFRH/BD/109242/2015. JP was supported by the project 'Genomics and Evolutionary Biology' co-financed by North Portugal Regional Operational Programme 2007/2013 (ON.2 - O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework, through the ERDF and by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under project EnvMetaGen (grant agreement no 668981). HSM was supported by FCT grant SFRH/BD/73765/2010. PB was supported by EDP Biodiversity Chair. FM was supported by IF/01053/2015. RP was supported by FCT grants SFRH/BPD/73478/2010 and SFRH/BPD/109235/2015. ; Peer reviewed ; Postprint