Rural landscape dynamics over time and its consequences for habitat preference patterns of the grey partridge Perdix perdix.

Intensification of agricultural practices has drastically shaped farmland landscapes and generally caused a decline in spatial and temporal heterogeneity, thus leading to changes in habitat quality and food resources and a decline for most farmland birds Europe-wide. The relationship between complex landscape changes and habitat preferences of animals still remains poorly understood. Particularly, temporal and spatial changes in diversity may affect not only habitat choice but also population sizes. To answer that question, we have looked into a severely declining typical farmland bird species, the grey partridge Perdix perdix in a diverse farmland landscape near Vienna to investigate the specific habitat preferences in respect to the change of agricultural landscape over two decades and geographic scales. Using a dataset collected over 7.64 km² and between 2001 and 2017 around Vienna, we calculated Chesson's electivity index to study the partridge's change of habitat selection over time on two scales and between winter and spring in 2017. Although the farmland landscape underwent an ongoing diversification over the two decades, the grey partridges declined in numbers and shifted habitat use to less diverse habitats. During covey period in winter, partridges preferred also human infrastructure reservoirs such as roads and used more diverse areas with smaller fields than during breeding where they selected harvested fields but surprisingly, avoided hedges, fallow land and greening. Known as best partridge habitats, those structures when inappropriately managed might rather function as predator reservoirs. The avoidance behaviour may further be a consequence of increasing landscape structuring and edge effects by civilisation constructions. Besides, the loss in size and quality of partridge farmland is altered by crop choice and pesticides reducing plant and insect food. With declining breeding pairs, the grey partridge does not seem to adjust to these unsustainable landscape changes and farmland practices.

Temporal patterns of roe deer traffic accidents: Effects of season, daytime and lunar phase.

Wildlife-related accidents, especially deer-vehicle accidents, pose a serious problem for road safety and animal protection in many countries. Knowledge of spatial and temporal patterns of deer-vehicle accidents is inevitable for accident analysis and mitigation efforts with temporal deer-vehicle accident data being much more difficult to obtain in sufficient data quality. We described the temporal patterns of roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) roadkills occurring in the period 2002-2006 in southeastern Austria. Using a comprehensive dataset, consisting of 11.771 data points, we examined the influence of different time units (i.e. season, month, day of week, day of year), illumination categories (coarse and fine temporal resolution) and lunar phases on deer-vehicle accidents by performing linear and generalized additive models. Thereby, we identified peak accident periods within the analyzed time units. Highest frequencies of deer-vehicle accidents occurred in November, May and October, on Fridays, and during nights. Relationships between lunar phases and roe deer-vehicle accidents were analysed, providing evidence for high frequencies of deer-vehicle accidents during full moon phases. We suggest that deer-vehicle accidents are dependent both on human activity in traffic and wildlife activity, which is in turn affected by phenology, intra- and interspecific competition, climatic and astronomical events. Our results highlight, that short-term mitigation measures (e.g. traffic controls and speed limits) can be highly effective to reduce deer-vehicle accidents, but should be flexibly adapted to specific temporal periods.

Growing in the city: Urban evolutionary ecology of avian growth rates.

INTRODUCTION: Rapid environmental change driven by urbanization offers a unique insight into the adaptive potential of urban-dwelling organisms. Urban-driven phenotypic differentiation is increasingly often demonstrated, but the impact of urbanization (here modelled as the percentage of impervious surface (ISA) around each nestbox) on offspring developmental rates and subsequent survival remains poorly understood. Furthermore, the role of selection on urban-driven phenotypic divergence was rarely investigated to date. METHODS AND RESULTS: Data on nestling development and body mass were analysed in a gradient of urbanization set in Warsaw, Poland, in two passerine species: great tits (Parus major) and blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). Increasing levels of impervious surface area (ISA) delayed the age of fastest growth in blue tits. Nestling body mass was also negatively affected by increasing ISA 5 and 10 days after hatching in great tits, and 10 and 15 days in blue tits, respectively. High levels of ISA also increased nestling mortality 5 and 10 days after hatching in both species. An analysis of selection differentials performed for two levels of urbanization (low and high ISA) revealed a positive association between mass at day 2 and survival at fledging. DISCUSSION: This study confirms the considerable negative impact of imperviousness-a proxy for urbanization level-on offspring development, body mass and survival, and highlights increased selection on avian mass at hatching in a high ISA environment.