Seasonal habitat use and breeding performance of the Eurasian Skylark (Alauda arvensis) in Central European farmland
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union has often been identified as a driver of recent agricultural intensification and thus of biodiversity loss. All major taxa, including vascular plants, arthropods, mammals, and birds, have undergone dramatic population declines on farmland du...
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| Other Authors: | , |
| Format: | Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2022
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| Online Access: | http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?ediss-11858/14118 https://doi.org/10.53846/goediss-9314 https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:7-ediss-14118-3 |
| Summary: | The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union has often been identified as a driver of recent agricultural intensification and thus of biodiversity loss. All major taxa, including vascular plants, arthropods, mammals, and birds, have undergone dramatic population declines on farmland during the second half of the 20th century. In that context, I started my PhD project on the seasonal habitat use and breeding performance of the Eurasian Skylark (Alauda arvensis), one of the current CAP’s greatest “loser” species. During the spring and summer of 2017 to 2019, I collected comprehensive data on the breeding biology of the Skylark population in the heterogeneous farmland south of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, in Germany. The new insights gained as a result of the project are presented in this dissertation. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the crisis facing European farmland birds, the interference of agricultural intensification with the breeding biology of Skylarks, and my thesis objectives. Intensified land use is associated with many processes, such as an increased application of pesticides and fertilizers or landscape homogenization. However, the widespread cultivation of dense-growing crops likely poses the most significant challenge to breeding Skylarks, as they strongly depend on accessible vegetation for both nest building and foraging. Crop growth during the breeding season is thought to induce an increasing paucity of suitable nesting and foraging habitats. Therefore, this PhD project aimed to investigate the seasonal changes in habitat use and breeding performance due to the growing crop vegetation. All findings are interpreted to provide recommendations for improved Skylark conservation. Chapter 2 deals with the decreasing suitability of winter cereals as nesting habitat, which is expected to be the primary driver behind the decline of Skylarks by curtailing the potential time for breeding of this multi-brooded species. My co-authors and I investigated: (i) the extent to which Skylarks in our study ... |
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