Complex landscapes stabilize farm bird communities and their expected ecosystem services

1. Birds play many roles within agroecosystems including as consumers of crops and pests, carriers of pathogens, and beloved icons. Birds are also rapidly declining across North America, in part due to agricultural intensification. Thus, it is imperative to identify how to manage agroecosystems to best support birds for multi-functional outcomes (e.g., crop production and conservation). Both the average amounts of services/disservices provided and their temporal stability are important for effective farm planning.

2. Here, we conducted point-count surveys for four years across 106 locations on 27 diversified farms in Washington and Oregon, USA. We classified birds as ecosystem service or disservice providers using indices spanning supporting, regulating, provisioning, and cultural services/disservices. We then examined service/disservice index pairwise correlations and assessed the relative importance of local, farm, and landscape complexity on the average and temporal stability of a...