Farmland bird communities in an agricultural landscape in Northwest Russia: Seasonal and spatial patterns

• Conservation relevance of agricultural landscapes in NW Russia is poorly known.
• Clear intra-seasonal variation in field utilisation by birds was found.
• Birds used arable fields most intensively before and at onset of the breeding season.
• Pastures and abandoned fields exhibited the highest habitat values in the region.
• Extensive use of grasslands could be a nature-friendly scenario for the region.

We conducted an inventory of birds in an agricultural landscape of 45 000 ha in the Northwest Russia, compared breeding densities of farmland species among existing fields types, and followed the seasonal pattern of field use by birds over a period of three months of May–July. We collected the data on transects in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2011. We analysed seasonal and spatial patterns of field use by generalised additive mixed models and multivariate procedures. The results confirm the importance of the region's agrolandscape for migrating birds. We observed distinct species communities among field types, especially in arable fields during spring migration and in abandoned fields and pastures in late summer. Pastures, multispecies grasslands as well as abandoned fields exhibited a particularly high habitat value for farmland birds. Arable fields had low habitat values for breeding birds. Our study reinforces the importance of a mosaic of land uses within the agrolandscape not only due to the species-specific habitat selection by breeding birds but also intra-seasonal variation in field utilisation for both breeding and non-breeding purposes. The results indicate that extensive use of grasslands, retention of some of the abandoned fields as open fallows, and certain increase of production on cereal fields could be a nature-friendly alternative for increasing agricultural production in the region.