The importance of traditional orchards for breeding birds: The preliminary study on Central European example

Orchards are parts of agriculture and apart from their economic role they may preserve biodiversity in highly transformed farmlands. An increasing intensity of orchards management is known to be threat for some species, especially pollinators and birds. On the other hand, the biodiversity of abandoned orchards was hardly investigated. Here, I present a survey of orchards in Poland to estimate how bird's diversities differ in response to the intensity of orchards management. In 2014, 66 orchards of three types - abandoned, extensively and intensively managed - were investigated. Bird species' richness and abundance were found to be highest in abandoned orchards but overall bird diversity and species composition in abandoned did not differ from these found in extensively managed orchards. In abandoned and extensively managed orchards, hollow-dwellers and insectivores (with some rare old-forest associated species) dominated, whereas in intensively managed orchards the most diverse were ground-dwellers. Among the several selected environmental features, the highest impact on bird diversity was related to the tree diversity, abundance of older trees, presence of multilayer understory and heterogeneous surrounding. The preliminary study point that traditional orchards could play a important role for wood-dwelling species in agriculture and because of that the removal or replacement of all traditional orchards by intensively managed orchards should be avoided and needs of orchard protection should be implemented into Agri-Environmental Schemes/High Nature Value farming systems and possibly also into habitat directive of EU. Unfortunately, the number of abandoned and extensively managed orchards is declining from agricultural landscapes, and traditional orchards are replaced by conventional fruit plantations.