Seminatural habitat surrounding farms promotes multifunctionality in avian ecosystem services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Farmland birds can suppress insect pests, but may also consume beneficial insects, damage crops, and potentially carry foodborne pathogens. As bird communities shift in response to farming practices, so too do the benefits (services) and costs (disservices) from birds. Understanding how and why ecosystem services and disservices covary can inform management interventions that enhance synergies, avoid tradeoffs, and promote multifunctionality. We investigated how farmland diversification practices influence the services and disservices provided by wild birds on 21 California strawberry farms. Specifically, we coupled 285 bird surveys, metabarcoding, and other molecular analyses of ~1,000 fecal samples representing 55 bird species (mostly passerines) to determine which individuals consumed pests, natural enemies, and crops and carried foodborne pathogens. Then, we explored how farming practices shape ecosystem service bundles, or suites of consistently co-occurring services/disservices. Avian services and disservices were shaped by interactions between local farming practices and landscape context. We found that the amount of seminatural habitat surrounding each farm was the single most important driver of ecosystem services, with the best outcomes (highest multifunctionality) occurring on farms surrounded by seminatural habitat. Bundles were primarily influenced by landscape context. Increasing seminatural habitat around farms was associated with more multifunctional bird communities that maximized services and minimized disservices. However, not all tradeoffs were minimized in landscapes with more seminatural habitat, suggesting that specific farming contexts can exacerbate or mitigate tradeoffs as bird communities shift in response to diversification practices. Synthesis and applications: Though growers are often pressured to remove noncrop habitat to reduce food-safety risks, our work suggests that conserving habitat can support bird conservation, mitigate food-safety risks, and decrease crop damage from birds. More broadly, by considering the multiple roles that communities play in ecosystems, managers can simultaneously maximize services and minimize disservices to achieve multifunctionality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".