Measuring and monitoring linear woody features in agricultural landscapes through earth observation data as an indicator of habitat availability

AbstractThe loss of natural habitats and the loss of biological diversity is a global problem affecting all ecosystems including agricultural landscapes. Indicators of biodiversity can provide standardized measures that make it easier to compare and communicate changes to an ecosystem. In agricultural landscapes the amount and variety of available habitat is directly correlated with biodiversity levels. Linear woody features (LWF), including hedgerows, windbreaks, shelterbelts as well as woody shrubs along fields, roads and watercourses, play a vital role in supporting biodiversity as well as serving a wide variety of other purposes in the ecosystem. Earth observation can be used to quantify and monitor LWF across the landscape. While individual features can be manually mapped, this research focused on the development of methods using line intersect sampling (LIS) for estimating LWF as an indicator of habitat availability in agricultural landscapes. The methods are accurate, efficient, repeatable and provide robust results. Methods were tested over 9.5Mha of agricultural landscape in the Canadian Mixedwood Plains ecozone. Approximately 97,000km of LWF were estimated across this landscape with results useable both at a regional reporting scale, as well as mapped across space for use in wildlife habitat modelling or other landscape management research. The LIS approach developed here could be employed at a variety of scales in particular for large regions and could be adapted for use as a national scale indicator of habitat availability in heavily disturbed agricultural landscape

Nesting cormorants and temporal changes in Island habitat

Double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus) populations have increased greatly across North America. The interior North America subpopulation is the largest with many birds nesting on the Laurentian Great Lakes. Lake Erie supports a large number of breeding pairs tha

Landscape level processes driving carabid crop assemblage in dynamic farmlands

International audienceLandscape heterogeneity has been shown to be a major factor in the maintenance of biodiversity and associated services in agricultural landscapes. Farmlands are mosaics of fields with various crop types and farming practices. Crop phenology creates asynchrony between fields sown and harvested in different periods (winter vs. spring crops). The present study was conducted to examine the influence of such spatio-temporal heterogeneity on biodiversity, with the hypothesis that it would lead to spatio-temporal redistribution (shifting) of species. Species richness and activity-density of carabid beetles in winter cereal (winter) and maize (spring) crops were compared across 20 landscapes distributed along a double gradient of relative area and spatial configuration of winter and spring crops. Maize fields were sampled in spring and late summer for comparison over time. The response of carabid species richness to landscape heterogeneity was weak in spring, but maize field richness benefited from adjacencies with woody habitat, in late summer. In spring, increased length of interfaces between winter and spring crops lowered carabid activity-density in winter cereal fields, suggesting that maize fields acted as sinks. Interfaces between woody habitats and crops increased activity-density in both crop types. We found no evidence of spatio-temporal complementation, but different species benefited from winter cereals and maize in spring and late summer, increasing overall diversity. These findings confirm the role of adjacencies between woody and cultivated habitats in the conservation of abundant carabid assemblage in winter cereals and maize. We conclude that between-field population movement occurs, and advocate for better consideration of farmland heterogeneity in future researc