SETBACKS AND SURPRISES Bird responses to riparian management of degraded lowland streams in southeastern Australia Robin Hale 1,2,3 , Paul Reich 1,4 , Matthew Johnson 1,5 , Birgita D. Hansen 6 , Phillip S. Lake 1 , James R. Thomson 7 , Ralph Mac Nally 7 We assessed the degree to which fencing, livestock exclusion, and replanting of riparian zones affected avian assemblages in massively cleared landscapes. Measurements were made at three creeks in the southern Murray–Darling Basin in southeastern Australia, each of which had circa 1-km long treated sections and paired “untreated” circa 1-km sections, where no fencing, planting, or stock exclusion was done. We measured the change in vegetation characteristics and abundances of native birds for up to 8years after works were completed. Prior to data collection, we developed expected responses of bird species based on the anticipated time-courses of change in vegetation structure. We used hierarchical Bayesian models to explore the effects of the management actions, and to account for within-site variation in vegetation characteristics. There were major changes in vegetation structure (reductions in bare ground and increases in shrubs and tree recruitment) but avian responses generally were small and not as expected. There are at least four possible reasons for the limited avian responses: (1) there has been a long-term decline in woodland birds across the region; (2) the study was conducted during the longest drought in the instrumental record in the study region; (3) the total amount of replanted vegetation was small in a massively denuded region; and (4) monitoring may have been over too short a term to detect responses to longer-term changes in structural vegetation. Key words: agricultural landscapes, Murray–Darling Basin, restoration, revegetation, trajectories of recovery Implications for Practice • Riparian management at the spatial scale reported here is likely to be ineffective in the face of regional-scale processes such as severe and extended drought, which may override biotic responses to local-scale management in much degraded landscapes. • Some birds are unlikely to respond to changed manage- ment practices for several decades until structural habi- tat resources become available. Assessing the useful- ness of riparian management for terrestrial birds requires long-term monitoring (at least several decades) and the maintenance of restored reaches. Introduction The ongoing increase of the world’s human population induces intensiication of land use, with the conversion of native veg- etation to agriculture or urbanization predicted to accelerate (Lambin & Meyfroidt 2011), along with the appropriation of water for human use (Palmer et al. 2008). The ecological effects of vegetation loss and water deprivation are most severe in riparian zones, which comprise the vegetation along the banks and loodplains of waterways. Riparian zones are the interface between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and mediate impor- tant exchanges of organic and inorganic materials and biota (Ballinger & Lake 2006). Riparian zones often have higher local biodiversity and are more ecologically productive than the sur- rounding landscape (Naiman et al. 2005). In many regions, climate change involves both drying and warming, elevating physiological stresses on the biota (Allen et al. 2010; Sherwood & Huber 2010). The ecological and exploitative value of riparian zones means that there is often a collision between human uses and biodiversity, with the latter generally coming off second best (Dolédec & Statzner 2010). Humans may rely more heavily on the relatively more fertile and moister riparian zones as upland areas become hotter and drier from climate change (Capon et al. 2013). These direct and indirect effects of climate change and human responses suggest that biota will be under ever-increasing pressure (MacNally et al. 2011). Author contributions: PR, PSL, RM, MJ conceived and designed the study; MJ, BH, PR undertook ieldwork; JT, RH conducted the statistical analyses; RH, RM wrote the irst draft of the manuscript; All authors contributed to the subsequent develop- ment of the manuscript. 1 School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria 3800, Australia 2 Address correspondence to R. Hale, email robin.hale@unimelb.edu.au 3 Present address: Department of Zoology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia 4 Department of Environment and Primary Industries, Arthur Rylah Institute for Envi- ronmental Research, 123 Brown Street, Heidelberg, Victoria 3084, Australia 5 Environmental Protection Agency Victoria, 200 Victoria Street, Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria 3053, Australia 6 Faculty of Science, Federation University Australia, Ballarat, Victoria 3353, Australia 7 Institute for Applied Ecology, The University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT 2617, Australia © 2014 Society for Ecological Restoration doi: 10.1111/rec.12158 Supporting information at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec.12158/suppinfo 104 Restoration Ecology Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 104–112 MARCH 2015