The potential of fallow management to promote steppe bird conservation within the next EU Common Agricultural Policy reform: Distance sampling dataset on farmland bird community

Agricultural intensification promoted by the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has driven the decline of farmland and steppe bird populations. Policy tools to improve the environmental performance of the CAP – including Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) and Greening – have often failed, and the new EU agricultural reform (CAP post-2020) offers a new opportunity to integrate effective measures addressing farmland bird declines. Fallow land and its management have proven beneficial for endangered steppe bird species by providing good quality habitat, and therefore has potential to become an effective conservation measure.
We used a Hierarchical Distance Sampling community model to evaluate the ability of different conservation regimes to increase the abundance of 37 bird species including endangered steppe birds and other farmland birds in 13,309 ha of fallow land in north-eastern Spain. The conservation regimes were based on different management prescriptions associated with ...