Bird occupancy in intensively managed agroecosystems under large-scale organic and conventional farming in Argentina: A multi-species approach

Several studies in European and North American agroecosystems conclude that organic farming benefits birds compared to conventional farming. Nevertheless, there are some biases toward these geographic regions and farm size. Argentinian agroecosystems are particularly homogeneous with large arable fields and sparse uncultivated field margins (i.e. large-scale homogenous cropping systems). In Argentina only 0.55% of the total farmland is under organic farming. Thus, our aims were to assess differences in bird occupancy between organic versus conventional farming regimes, and whether bird occupancy varied in relation to annual crop proportion in both farming regimes in central Argentina agroecosystems. We surveyed 156 points in farms under conventional and 154 in organic farming regimes during two bird-breeding seasons. We used multi-species occupancy models with a Bayesian approach to estimate bird occupancy. We observed that the type of farming regime (organic in relation to conventional) had a weak effect on avian occupancy, varying by species and groups. Probability of occupancy was higher for a few insectivorous and omnivorous species but lower for carnivores in organic farms in relation to conventional ones. The proportion of annual crops was positively correlated with occupancy of an insectivore aerial forager, some insectivore foliage gleaners, a granivore, and some omnivorous species in organic farms, but not conventional farms. This work contributes to reducing geographic and small-scale heterogeneous cropping system biases in the avian agroecological literature. Our results, together with future studies needed to assess landscape configuration and composition, and resource availability for birds in each farming regime, will allow the evaluation of organic farming as a tool for the conservation of bird species in large-scale homogeneous cropping systems in temperate regions.