Research Article ComparisonofNestingFeaturesandBreedingSuccessofTurtle Dove Streptopelia turtur betweenOrchardsandRiparianHabitats IsmailMansouri , 1 WafaeSqualli , 1 AbdelbariElAgy , 1 AbderahimEl-Hassani, 1 LahcenElGhadraoui, 1 andMohamedDakki 2 1 Laboratory of Functional Ecology and Genie of Environment, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, USMBA, Fez, Morocco 2 Geo-biodiversity and Natural Patrimony Laboratory, Scientific Institute, Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, Rabat 10106, Morocco Correspondence should be addressed to Ismail Mansouri; mankhori@gmail.com Received 29 January 2021; Revised 21 March 2021; Accepted 29 March 2021; Published 8 April 2021 Academic Editor: Marco Cucco Copyright © 2021 Ismail Mansouri et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. e European turtle dove Streptopeliaturtur breeds in both farmlands and woodlands, and it is important to explore the difference in breeding ecology of this threatened game in these two ecosystem types. is study, carried out during four years (2015–2018), compares nesting features of this species and its breeding success between apple orchards and riparian vegetation in Midelt Province, Morocco. e main result revealed that the nest placement, including nesting-tree height and nest height, is similar between orchards and riparian trees. However, the nest dimensions (big and small diameters) were larger in orchards. Cor- relations were variable among nest placement parameters and dimensions. On the contrary, in four breeding seasons, where 566 nests were monitored (467 in orchards and 99 in riparian sites), the average breeding success was different (57% of chicks in apple farms and 53% in riparian vegetation). Moreover, in apple orchards, clutches’ failure is due to both predation (18.89% of eggs and 10.54% of chicks) and temperature lowering (5.03% of unhatched eggs and 5.49% of dead chicks), while in riparian vegetation, the loss is due to nest desertion (21.33% of clutches) and mostly predation (33.16% of clutches). 1.Introduction e European turtle dove Streptopelia turtur is among birds that have dramatically declined in Europe (−78% in Britain between 1980 and 2013, as well as −70% in Spain between 1980 and 2017) [1]. Consequently, it has been classified as “Near reatened” within the European countries and “Vulnerable” throughout Africa and Europe, following re- cent evaluation [2]. Potential factors responsible for the species’ decline include breeding habitat degradation [3], reduction of food availability due to agricultural intensifi- cation [4, 5], hunting, and variation in ecological conditions throughout the migration flyway [5–7]. In Northwestern Africa, the turtle dove is a common breeder and summer migrant [8–10]. It has an important breeding population in Morocco [11], largely dispersed in forest ecosystems [12, 13] that represent 12.7% of the national territory [14] and farmlands representing 1.5% [11] of the total land area. In agricultural lands, they are more frequent in farm landscapes with irrigated perimeters [10, 15–19], including olive, orange, and apple orchards being particularly favoured [15, 18–20]. Similarly, in Algeria, the turtle dove is distributed over a wide area of the northern part of the country and over the palm oases and groves in the south [21–23]. On the contrary, in Tunisia, where this species is less studied, rare information exists on its breeding and foraging ranges [24]. Most studies of the turtle dove on both European and North African populations have focused on farmland habitats, involving breeding biology [3, 19–22], habitat use [3, 4, 7, 25–28], foraging [4, 18, 29–31], and migration [32–34]. In natural forests, studies were mainly limited to habitat use [27, 35–39] and feeding resources [31, 37]. Moreover, no breeding comparison has been carried out Hindawi International Journal of Zoology Volume 2021, Article ID 5566398, 7 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5566398