Abstract
Conservation strategies of today are largely based on inventories of local species abundance. However, the pay-off of such inventory based conservation actions is often poor as shown for agri-environment schemes. One possibility is that many conservation actions have failed because of erroneous conservation strategies due to ecological traps. Ecological traps occur when organisms choose poor-quality habitats above high-quality ones, a scenario that is very likely in environments under strong human modification (e.g. farmland, production forest). Despite ecological traps cause populations to go extinct, the ecological trap scenario is usually ignored when discussing farmland bird conservation, probably because its detection requires high quality data on habitat preferences and individual fitness. I suggest a practical, more cost-efficient, method to identify ecological traps without including costly data on demography. By collecting data on habitat-specific densities on farmland birds in landscape gradients differing in the proportion of sink habitat I will (1) identify and test ecological trap scenarios of three model farmland bird species (2) test whether ecological trap selection patterns is linked to smaller brain size and niche breadths (reflecting less flexible habitat selection) in 15 other bird species. Last I will test whether survival rate or reproduction drives a demographic sink, because this may have consequences for which habitat to protect.
Sweden