Date: August 3, 2018
Source: Hokkaido University
Agriculture and conversion of
pristine lands into urban or industrial areas have exerted immense pressure on
the natural biota due to habitat destruction and fragmentation in
industrialized countries around the world. But since the 1900s, farmlands have
been increasingly abandoned due to the decline in domestic agriculture and, in
some countries, a decline in population. This yields an opportunity for
abandoned farmlands to be used as rehabilitation zones for grassland, wetland,
and forest animals. However, it has so far remained unclear how valuable for
sustaining specific animal communities farmlands, abandoned farmlands, and
natural habitats are relative to each other.
Hokkaido University's Futoshi
Nakamura and his collaborators including Yuichi Yamaura of Forestry and Forest
Products Research Institute, published in the journal Agriculture,
Ecosystems and Environment, studied bird species distribution over an area in
central Hokkaido, Japan. The group then correlated abundance and species
richness of different bird communities with different degrees of farmland
abandonment and the landscape structure. Mapped back onto the landscape of the
known composition, this allowed them to evaluate the potential to conserve
different bird communities if existing farmlands in a given area were to be
abandoned.
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