Response of non-grassland avian guilds to adjacent herbaceous field buffers: testing hypotheses about configuration of targeted conservation practices in agricultural landscapes

1. A substantial part of the world's land base is dominated by agriculture, and forest habitat often consists of discrete patches of forest and linear woody corridors. These natural components provide habitat for some forest birds, but make conservation of these species difficult. In-field practices applied outside forest patches, such as specific juxtapositions of herbaceous field buffers adjacent to forest habitat, could increase avian diversity contributions of existing forest without creation of additional forest habitat. Our prediction was that herbaceous field buffers would increase bird richness in adjacent forest, and we evaluated four potential mechanisms. 2. We used bird count data from a conservation buffer monitoring program and hierarchical community models to estimate species richness of forest generalist, forest interior, and shrubland (edge) species near forest edges with and without adjacent herbaceous field buffers. We accounted for heterogeneity in detection probabili...