Birds and plants: Comparing biodiversity indicators in eight lowland agricultural mosaic landscapes in Hungary

摘要

This study compares biodiversity indicators based on plant and bird communities in eight mosaic landscapes in Hungary, dominated by a mixture of agro-ecosystems and grasslands. The eight landscapes were selected to represent the diversity of the mixed agricultural landscapes of South-East Europe, where a mosaic pattern of intensively managed farmlands and high nature value semi natural grasslands is still relatively prevalent. Bird communities were described using several assemblage-level (species number, total abundance, and Shannon diversity of the assemblage, based on 15 pre-selected key farmland bird species), as well as species-level (presence/absence of the 15 bird species) indicators, which were checked against a synthetic landscape quality indicator describing the degradation of the local plant communities with respect to an ideal baseline (vegetation-based natural capital index, NCI). The authors were interested if and how the assemblage- and species-level bird indicators can describe landscape quality in South-East European agricultural mosaic landscapes.