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

人为变化正在导致全球生物多样性的丧失。栖息地的丧失/退化导致了许多这种下降，但影响的程度是直接的-觅食或繁殖地点的丧失-还是间接的-通过栖息地的简化或破碎改变捕食-往往尚不清楚。解开栖息地变化和捕食压力对种群下降的基本过程的影响和相互作用仍然是全球野生动物管理的一个关键问题。农业对生物多样性产生了巨大的全球影响。然而，关键问题仍然是如何在耕作景观中分配土地，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-分享的争论越来越多地被应用于温带地区，但在许多自然资源丰富的北方农业系统中仍然没有得到研究。然而，鉴于通过农业环境计划（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”可能会掩盖栖息地类型和栖息地基质对维持生物多样性的贡献的重要变化。农田鸟类正在广泛减少，但对于许多分类群来说，仍然不确定是栖息地变化的直接影响，还是捕食压力的间接影响，或者它们之间的相互作用，是导致衰退的关键机制。理解这一点是设计农场景观的核心，有效地保持生物多样性和粮食生产。我们将利用自然实验提供的独特机会，在引入非本地捕食者并持续尝试将其移除后，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禽种群的存在。这导致了交叉梯度的捕食压力和栖息地类型与异常大规模的捕食者和猎物的分布和丰度的现有数据，使其成为一个理想的系统，以调查的程度和重要性，这些双驱动程序在促进物种的下降。

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.