Predicting the fate of French bird communities under agriculture and climate change scenarios

• We evaluated impacts of various scenarios of land use/cover changes on common birds.
• We took into account potential changes in climatic niche of the species.
• We highlighted that agricultural changes can be adequate drivers of bird diversity.
• Agricultural extensification is more appropriate to improve bird populations.
• We stressed that regional policy making may benefit to a largest number of species.

The use of forward scenarios to forecast the environmental implications of potential changes in climate and land use is a useful tool for policy development. In this paper, we projected the potential responses of bird communities to both climate and agricultural changes. We created four scenarios of agricultural changes (current trends, biofuel development, livestock extensification and agricultural extensification), each developed at national or regional level of policy-making. We further considered three climatic scenarios (A1B, A2 and B1) from among the IPCC 4th Assessment Report scenarios. We assessed changes in bird communities based on the predicted changes in agricultural land use and climatic suitability using various indicators, including the European Farmland Bird Indicator (FBI) and the Community Specialisation Index (CSI). We found that trends in the different indicators differed greatly from each other depending on the agricultural scenarios and policy-making scale. Our results suggest that public policies that promote extensive agricultural practices are more appropriate for improving the fate of bird communities in agricultural landscapes, especially with the regionalisation of agricultural policy. These results provide a readily accessible visualisation of the potential impacts of land use and climate change on farmland bird communities.