Session Information
| Session | Poster Session | | Date | Monday (2008-04-07) | | Time | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM | | Room | Grand Terrace |
Presentation Information
| Presenter | Sam Riffell | | Title | The Conservation Reserve Program and grassland birds: The influence of practice type, configuration and contract age | | Affiliation | Mississippi State University | | Authors | Sam Riffell, Daniel Scognamillo, Wes Burger, Shawn Bucholtz | | Keywords | Agricultural landscape, Conservation Reserve Program, Grassland birds, Habitat configuration | | Presentation Type | Poster | Abstract:
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is a voluntary cropland diversion program where agricultural producers can retire productive cropland into a variety of conservation practices. Grassland birds should benefit from the CRP because the majority of CRP habitat is in grass-based practices and because participation (amount of land in CRP habitats) is highest in agriculture-dominated areas of the United States where grassland birds may be most severely impacted. We used the Breeding Bird Survey (a long-term monitoring database) and the Common Land Unit (CLU) database (a spatially-explicit database of farm field boundaries) to assess the impact of specific types and configurations of CRP on grassland bird abundance across a 3-state area of the midwestern United States. Abundance of all 13 grassland birds we studied was related to CRP habitat. Individual species were related to specific conservation practices (e.g., native vs. exotic grass), configuration of CRP habitat, and the age of the contract. Treating all types of CRP habitat as a single habitat type would have obscured bird-CRP relations. Our ability to use the CLU database to quantify these characteristics of CRP represents a significant advance in our knowledge of bird-CRP relations. Based on our results, grassland birds in our 3-state study area would benefit from periodic disturbances to maintain early successional vegetation structure in some of the existing CRP habitat and planning aimed at creating a mosaic of large and small CRP habitats to benefit both area-sensitive and edge-associated grassland birds. |
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