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Abstract:

In Europe, the most widespread land cover category is agriculture, including Non-irrigated arable land. The agricultural land cover category includes various types of land use with different levels of human impact. The heterogeneity and spatial structure of these landscapes vary among regions and countries, but the decline of farmland bird species population can be observed in almost all European countries. This decrease can be detected from the abundance data of farmland birds, such as the Eurasian skylark (Alauda arvensis). Some small-scale studies have analysed the relation between country- and regional-level land cover types and the population data of farmland birds. Europe-wide analysis is necessary to detect the land use land cover (LULC) types that are suitable habitat for the skylark and to compare the population density data of skylarks in Hungary and Schleswig-Holstein, with the pan-European LULC datasets. In this study, we used the Corine Land Cover (CLC) 2012 dataset from the European Union and two (Hungarian and German) bird monitoring datasets were aggregated at the same grid size (5 × 5 km). Based on the CLC land cover dataset, we identified the land cover types of the Eurasian skylark habitat. We performed our statistical calculations by generalised linear models (GLMs) in R to determine the impact of land cover types on the abundance of skylarks. We applied negative binomial models to account for the over-dispersion of the skylark abundance data and the step AIC function with the stepwise function in both directions. In Hungary, we found a significant positive relation between skylark abundance and the Natural grassland LULC category and six significant negative relation s (e.g., Fruit trees and berry plantations; Complex cultivation patterns and Forests). In Schleswig-Holstein, we found significant positive relations between skylark abundance and Pastures and Natural grasslands. We identified the land cover types which shows positive relation s with skylark abundance as skylark habitat areas and the land cover types with negative relations with skylark abundance as skylark non-habitat areas. We calculated the habitat and non-habitat areas of the Eurasian skylark for each grid size (5 × 5 km) of CLC database and visualised the habitat changes between 2000 and 2018. We calculated habitat changes of European countries and compared it with the country level population change data of Eurasian skylark. Based on this he European-scale habitat change map of skylark we can detect habitat change hotspots of this farmland bird in European scale.