Landscape context and farm uptake limit effects of bird conservation in the Swedish Volunteer & Farmer Alliance

1. In Europe, agri-environmental schemes (AES) have been unsuccessful in halting biodiversity declines to any great extent. Two particular shortcomings of AES include the low farm uptake and the modest efficacy of many AES options. Partly in response to these shortcomings, initiatives encouraging farmers to take an active role in biodiversity conservation have gained in popularity. However, almost no evaluations of such initiatives exist. 2. We evaluated uptake of conservation advice on farms in the Swedish Volunteer & Farmer Alliance, a BirdLife Sweden-coordinated project aimed at farmland bird conservation, and the response of farmland birds to those actions using farm-level survey data, in a before-after implementation assessment. 3. Uptake was higher for unsubsidised (i.e. non-AES) measures than for AES options, and depended on farmers’ interest in nature, farm size (higher uptake on larger farms) and production type (higher on organic farms). 4. In general, abundances of non-c...