Villages and their old farmsteads are hot spots of bird diversity in agricultural landscapes

To counteract the decline of farmland biodiversity in Europe, it is crucial to recognize habitats that are hot spots. Old rural settlements (e.g. villages) may be such important habitats, although these presumably biodiversity-rich habitats have received little attention. Socio-economic changes in central-eastern Europe since 1989 mean that old homesteads and farmsteads are being replaced by new ones.
We investigated bird species composition, richness and abundance at three spatial scales (single rural property, village and landscape) in the farmland of Poland to test: (i) their association with age (built before vs. after 1989) and type of property (farmstead vs. homestead), (ii) their relationship with the increasing share of new homesteads at the village scale and (iii) the difference in diversity between the village environment and four other environments (open fields, forest–field ecotones, forests and towns) at the landscape scale.
At the single property scale, 15 out of 33 spec...