Home – Home – Jornals – Contemporary Problems of Ecology 2015 number 2

At the end of the first decade of the 2000s the community of birds in the agricultural landscape of south boreal forest in the Middle Urals demonstrated substantial changes as compared to the population studied in 1978-1980. The community density within the agricultural landscape area increased by 1.3 times, the species richness increased by 1.5 times, the number of nesting species more than tripled. The observed changes were caused by the wide-spread occurrence of a new type of habitat areas within the agricultural landscape - fallow lands that appeared because of the reduction in agricultural production and removal of plow-lands from the agriculture. At the first stages of demutational succession of vegetation, the fallow lands have characteristics that are similar to natural shrub-and-grassland habitat areas and are highly attractive for field, grassland, shrub-grassland and forest-fringe species of birds. Thus, the reduction in agricultural production intensified an important biospheric function of the agricultural landscape - preservation of landscape diversity and biological diversity. At the same time, the number of species that became dependent on the agricultural landscape and agriculture in general (rooks, grey crows, rock pigeons) decreased notably when the agricultural production was curtailed.