Understanding the role of agroecosystems as habitat for wildlife is crucial for long-term conservation planning, as different crop stratification and landscape elements can influence bird communities, which are also affected by seasonality. The goal of our study was to determine how agricultural landscapes varying in land cover characteristics affect bird richness and abundance. Bird surveys were conducted at 110 locations within agricultural landscapes in central Chile. The surveyed areas were characterized by land cover at two scales (50 and 500 m radii) through direct observation and photo-interpretation, during winter and spring seasons. Generalized Linear Mixed Models were used to evaluate the effects of different agricultural land covers on bird species and communities. Our results show that birds were more abundant during winter, in particular for insectivorous and granivorous birds, and that bird species richness was significantly increased due to cover provided by hedgerows at the plot scale. We found that abundance of some bird species in agroecosystems in central Chile was higher in winter than in spring, and that overall bird richness was favored by structural diversity including non-crop structures such as hedgerows, which thus may be relevant for improving bird conservation management in temperate agroecosystems. Our results suggest that native vegetation proximity and area may affect seasonal changes in bird communities at larger scales, relationships which warrant further study.

Land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes are major drivers of biodiversity loss in semi-arid regions, such as the Caatinga biome located in the Northeast of Brazil. We investigated landscape dynamics and fragmentation in an area of the São Francisco Valley in the Brazilian Caatinga biome and measured the effect of these dynamics on ecological, functional and structural connectivity over a 33-year period (1985–2018). We calculated landscape connectivity indices based on graph theory to quantify the effect of further agricultural expansion on ecological connectivity at the landscape scale. We used a multicriteria decision analysis that integrates graph-based connectivity indices at the habitat patch scale, combined with an index of human disturbance to identify patches that, if conserved and restored, preserve the connectivity of the landscape most effectively. In the period studied, agriculture increased at a rate of 2104 ha/year, while native Caatinga vegetation decreased at a rate of 5203 ha/year. Both dense and open Caatinga became more fragmented, with the number of fragments increasing by 85.2% and 28.6%, respectively, whilst the average fragment size decreased by 84.8% and 6.1% for dense and open Caatinga, respectively. If agriculture patches were to expand by a 300 m buffer around each patch, the overall ecological connectivity could be reduced by 6–15%, depending on the species’ (small- to mid-size terrestrial vertebrates) mobility characteristics for which the connectivity indices were calculated. We provided explicit spatial connectivity and fragmentation information for the conservation and restoration of the Caatinga vegetation in the studied area. This information helps with conservation planning in this rapidly changing ecosystem.

Agricultural management practices have impacts not only on crops and livestock, but also on soil, water, wildlife, and ecosystem services. Agricultural research provides evidence about these impacts, but it is unclear how this evidence should be used to make decisions. Two methods are widely used in decision making: evidence synthesis and decision analysis. However, a system of evidence-based decision making that integrates these two methods has not yet been established. Moreover, the standard methods of evidence synthesis have a narrow focus (e.g., the effects of one management practice), but the standard methods of decision analysis have a wide focus (e.g., the comparative effectiveness of multiple management practices). Thus, there is a mismatch between the outputs from evidence synthesis and the inputs that are needed for decision analysis. We show how evidence for a wide range of agricultural practices can be reviewed and summarized simultaneously (“subject-wide evidence synthesis”), and how this evidence can be assessed by experts and used for decision making (“multiple-criteria decision analysis”). We show how these methods could be used by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in California to select the best management practices for multiple ecosystem services in Mediterranean-type farmland and rangeland, based on a subject-wide evidence synthesis that was published by Conservation Evidence (www.conservationevidence.com). This method of “evidence-based decision analysis” could be used at different scales, from the local scale (farmers deciding which practices to adopt) to the national or international scale (policy makers deciding which practices to support through agricultural subsidies or other payments for ecosystem services). We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this method, and we suggest some general principles for improving evidence synthesis as the basis for multi-criteria decision analysis.

Agriculture is a leading cause of biodiversity loss, making the transition to sustainable agroecological practices crucial. Insectivorous bats play a crucial role as biological controllers in regard to agricultural crops, serving as important insect predators. The purpose of this study is to assess bat communities in three distinct habitats, namely the interior of a vineyard, native vegetation, and the transitional edge between them, by analyzing the echolocation patterns of different species. Generalized linear mixed models were used to evaluate the influence of landscape characteristics on bat communities and at the species level, allowing the incorporation of variables at different scales (at 10 m, 100 m, and 1000 m radius) from each sampling site. Our results show that edges enhance bat richness, their general activity, and feeding patterns, and are of particular benefit to certain species: Tadarida brasiliensis, Myotis chiloensis, and Lasiurus varius. Implementing agroecological practices, such as the maintenance of tree hedgerows at the landscape scale, along with native vegetation at the landscape scale, can amplify feeding activity in vineyards, thereby enhancing the provision of ecosystem services in agroecosystems. The edges of vineyards and natural vegetation are crucial for providing habitats for bats and increasing their foraging activity, as well as providing a way to enhance agroecological practices in vineyards to bolster ecosystem services.