Developing effective agricultural wetland management to reduce predation and improve wader breeding outcomes

人为变化正在推动世界范围内生物多样性的丧失。栖息地的丧失/退化导致了许多这些下降，但影响的直接程度——觅食或繁殖地点的丧失——或通过栖息地简化或破碎化间接改变捕食——往往尚不清楚。解开栖息地变化和捕食压力的基本过程对种群数量下降的影响和相互作用，仍然是全球野生动物管理中的一个关键问题。农业对生物多样性产生了巨大的全球影响。然而，关键的问题仍然存在，即如何在农业景观中分配土地，以保持生物多样性，同时满足日益增长的粮食需求。这种土地节约共享的争论越来越多地应用于温带地区，但在许多自然资源丰富的北方农业系统中仍未得到研究。然而，考虑到通过农业环境计划（AES）分配的大量资金以及围绕其生物多样性保护有效性的担忧，这种知识是必不可少的。此外，将整个混合农业系统视为“自然丰富”，可能会掩盖生境类型和生境矩阵对维持生物多样性贡献的重要变化。英国的农场景观体现了这些过程和冲突；农田鸟类正在广泛减少，但对于许多类群来说，栖息地变化的直接影响，或捕食压力的间接影响，或两者之间的相互作用，是导致鸟类数量减少的关键机制，仍然存在不确定性。了解这一点对于设计有效维持生物多样性和粮食生产的农田景观至关重要。我们将利用一个独特的自然实验提供的机会，在引入一种非本地捕食者并不断尝试移除它之后，结合多样化的农田栖息地矩阵，以及奥克尼群岛内国家重要的涉水动物种群的存在。这导致了捕食压力和栖息地类型的交叉梯度，以及关于捕食者和猎物分布和丰度的特殊大规模现有数据，使其成为研究这两个驱动因素在促进物种减少中的程度和重要性的理想系统。

Anthropogenic changes are driving biodiversity losses worldwide. Habitat loss/degradation causes many of these declines, but the extent to which impacts are direct - loss of foraging or breeding locations - or indirect - altering predation via habitat simplification or fragmentation - often remains unclear. Disentangling the impacts of, and interactions between, the fundamental processes of habitat change and predation pressure on declining populations remains a key issue within wildlife management worldwide.Agriculture exerts a massive global footprint on biodiversity. However, crucial questions remain over how land should be apportioned within farmed landscapes to maintain biodiversity while meeting increasing food demands. This land sparing-sharing debate is increasingly being applied to temperate regions, but remains unstudied in many nature-rich northern farming systems. Yet this knowledge is essential given the large amounts of money distributed via agri-environment schemes (AES) and concerns surrounding their effectiveness for biodiversity preservation. In addition, considering an entire mixed farming system as 'nature-rich' can mask important variation in the contribution of habitat type and the habitat matrix to the maintenance of biodiversity.UK farmed landscapes exemplify these processes and conflicts; farmland birds are declining widely, but for many taxa there remains uncertainty over whether the direct impacts of habitat change, or indirect impacts from predation pressure, or the interaction between these, are the key mechanisms driving declines. Understanding this is central to designing farmed landscapes that effectively maintain biodiversity alongside food production.We will utilise the unique opportunity provided by a natural experiment following the introduction of a non-native predator and ongoing attempts to remove it, combined with a diverse farmland habitat matrix, and the presence of nationally important populations of waders, within the Orkney Islands. This has resulted in intersecting gradients of predation pressure and habitat type with exceptional large-scale existing data on predator and prey distributions and abundance, making it an ideal system to investigate the extent and importance of these twin drivers in contributing to species' declines.