GLOBAL CHANGE ECOLOGY - ORIGINAL RESEARCH Contrasting spatial and temporal responses of bird communities to landscape changes Se ´bastien Bonthoux • Jean-Yves Barnagaud • Michel Goulard • Ge ´rard Balent Received: 26 April 2012 / Accepted: 1 October 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 Abstract Quantifying the impact of land-use changes on biodiversity is a major challenge in conservation ecology. Static spatial relationships between bird communities and agricultural landscapes have been extensively studied. Yet, their ability to mirror the effects of temporal land-use dynamics remains to be demonstrated. Here, we test whe- ther such space-for-time substitution approaches are rele- vant for explaining temporal variations in farmland bird communities. We surveyed 256 bird communities in an agricultural landscape in southwest France at the same locations in 1982 and 2007, and quantified the same seven landscape descriptors for each period. We compared the effects of spatial and temporal landscape changes over this 25-year period on bird species distributions and three community-level metrics: species richness and two com- munity indices reflecting birds’ specialisation regarding local vegetation structure (local CSI) and landscape composition (landscape CSI). Landscape heterogeneity decreased between 1982 and 2007 and crop area increased sharply at the expense of grassland as a result of agricul- tural intensification. We found that the correlations between temporal changes in bird distributions or com- munity metrics and landscape components were less con- sistent than their spatial relationships in each year. This result advocates caution when using a space-for-time sub- stitution approach to assess the effects of landscape chan- ges on biodiversity. Additionally, community metrics showed contrasted responses to landscape changes. Species richness and local CSI for each period were negatively related to the area of crops and positively related to land- scape heterogeneity. Conversely, the landscape CSI was positively related to the area of crop and negatively to landscape heterogeneity. To understand the ecological processes linked to changes in farm landscapes, our study underlines the need to develop long-term studies with bird and habitat data collected during several periods, and particularly to consider multiple community indices in monitoring change. Keywords Land-use change Á Space-for-time substitution Á Specialisation Á Birds Introduction Quantifying the impact of rapid land-use changes on bio- diversity has become a major conservation issue (Sala et al. 2000), particularly due to the objective of maintaining ecosystem services in human-exploited areas (Balmford et al. 2005). Recent intensification of agricultural practices has led to significant modifications in the composition of farmland, with a conversion of uncultivated areas into Communicated by Esa Lehikoinen. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00442-012-2498-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. S. Bonthoux Á M. Goulard Á G. Balent INRA UMR1201 DYNAFOR, 31320 Castanet-Tolosan, France S. Bonthoux (&) ENSNP, 9 rue de la Chocolaterie, C.S. 2902, 41029 Blois Cedex, France e-mail: bonthoux.sebastien@gmail.com J.-Y. Barnagaud Irstea, UR EFNO, Domaine des Barres, 45290 Nogent sur Vernisson, France J.-Y. Barnagaud INRA, UMR 1202 BIOGECO, 33612 Cestas, France 123 Oecologia DOI 10.1007/s00442-012-2498-2