Data from: Sensitivity of the farmland bird community to crop diversification in Sweden: does the CAP fit? ...

• Main Authors: Josefsson, Jonas, Berg, Åke, Hiron, Matthew, Pärt, Tomas, Eggers, Sönke
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2017
• Subjects: mosaic landscapes; Carduelis carduelis; Warbler Locustella naevia; Circus pygargus; Common Agricultural Policy; Luscinia luscinia; Landscape complexity; crop diversification; Passer montanus; Phasianus colchicus; Crex Crex; Emberiza calandra; Falco tinnunculus; Perdix perdix; multifunctional agriculture; Land-use; wildlife conservation; Vanellus vanellus; Motacilla alba; Lanius collurio; Emberiza hortulana; agri-environment schemes; Sylvia communis; Gallinago gallinago; Saxicola rubetra; Passer domesticus; Emberiza citrinella; Hirundo rustica; Anthus pratensis; Martin Delichon urbicum; Coturnix coturnix; Numenius arquata; Carduelis cannabina; Alauda arvensis; Sturnus vulgaris; Oenanthe oenanthe; Motacilla flava
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0g794; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.0g794

Crop diversification has been introduced as an environmental strategy in the ‘Greening’ of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for 2015–2020. The primary target of crop diversification is soil and ecosystem resilience, but claims for potential benefits for farmland biodiversity are also common. However, understanding of relationships between the number (compositional heterogeneity) and spatial arrangement (configurational heterogeneity) of crop fields and biodiversity is generally poor, making such claims relatively unfounded. In this study, we monitored crop and farmland bird diversity on 178 farms across Sweden's main agricultural areas. From a pre-implementation assessment, we show that >97% of the assessed farms would not be required to change their management under the CAP crop diversification measure (minimum of three crops for farms with 30+ ha), suggesting that this measure has generated little change on Swedish farms. While accounting for non-crop elements and farming system (conventional or ... : Complete data setFarmland bird inventory data (species richness and abundance) was collected through the Swedish Volunteer & Farmer Alliance. A Read me, including explanations for each column, is found in the second tab of the xlsx-file.Josefssonetal_farmlandbird-data.xlsx ...