Multi-Scale Associations between Vegetation Cover and Woodland Bird Communities across a Large Agricultural Region Karen Ikin*, Philip S. Barton, Ingrid A. Stirnemann, John R. Stein, Damian Michael, Mason Crane, Sachiko Okada, David B. Lindenmayer Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian Research Council Centre for Environmental Decisions, National Environmental Research Program Environmental Decisions Hub, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Abstract Improving biodiversity conservation in fragmented agricultural landscapes has become an important global issue. Vegetation at the patch and landscape-scale is important for species occupancy and diversity, yet few previous studies have explored multi-scale associations between vegetation and community assemblages. Here, we investigated how patch and landscape-scale vegetation cover structure woodland bird communities. We asked: (1) How is the bird community associated with the vegetation structure of woodland patches and the amount of vegetation cover in the surrounding landscape? (2) Do species of conservation concern respond to woodland vegetation structure and surrounding vegetation cover differently to other species in the community? And (3) Can the relationships between the bird community and the woodland vegetation structure and surrounding vegetation cover be explained by the ecological traits of the species comprising the bird community? We studied 103 woodland patches (0.5 - 53.8 ha) over two time periods across a large (6,800 km 2 ) agricultural region in southeastern Australia. We found that both patch vegetation and surrounding woody vegetation cover were important for structuring the bird community, and that these relationships were consistent over time. In particular, the occurrence of mistletoe within the patches and high values of woody vegetation cover within 1,000 ha and 10,000 ha were important, especially for bird species of conservation concern. We found that the majority of these species displayed similar, positive responses to patch and landscape vegetation attributes. We also found that these relationships were related to the foraging and nesting traits of the bird community. Our findings suggest that management strategies to increase both remnant vegetation quality and the cover of surrounding woody vegetation in fragmented agricultural landscapes may lead to improved conservation of bird communities. Citation: Ikin K, Barton PS, Stirnemann IA, Stein JR, Michael D, et al. (2014) Multi-Scale Associations between Vegetation Cover and Woodland Bird Communities across a Large Agricultural Region. PLoS ONE 9(5): e97029. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0097029 Editor: Francisco Moreira, Institute of Agronomy, University of Lisbon, Portugal Received February 8, 2014; Accepted April 14, 2014; Published May 15, 2014 Copyright: ß 2014 Ikin et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors thank the Australian Research Council, the Murray Catchment Management Authority and the Caring for Our Country Program for funding for this project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: karen.ikin@anu.edu.au Introduction Agricultural landscapes worldwide share a common history of native vegetation modification due to intensive land use, including tropical forests of Brazil [1], sagebrush-steppe landscapes of northwest America [2], semi-natural grasslands of northern Europe [3], and temperate eucalypt-dominated woodlands of Australia [4]. Within such landscapes, the intensification and expansion of agriculture has led to widespread loss and fragmentation of native vegetation [5]. Native vegetation patches provide key habitat resources for many species, including those of conservation concern, helping these species to persist in fragment- ed agricultural landscapes. For example, previous studies have found that remnant native vegetation was crucial for mammals in southern Spain [6] and the western Great Plains of North America [7], declining birds in the United Kingdom [8], The Netherlands [9] and Australia [10,11], and ant communities in Brazil [12]. It is therefore important to better understand the factors affecting biodiversity in native vegetation patches to inform conservation strategies in agricultural landscapes. It is well documented that both patch and landscape vegetation cover and structure are important for woodland birds in agricultural landscapes [13–16]. Such previous research has focused predominantly on species-specific responses (e.g. individual species occupancy) or effects on species diversity (richness and abundance). How patch and landscape-scale vegetation affects bird community composition is comparatively less well-understood [17,18]. Recent studies suggest that bird communities are influenced by vegetation at both the patch and landscape scale [10,18–20], consistent with species-specific and species diversity investigations. There have been mixed findings, however, regard- ing the differing effects of vegetation at these scales on community composition [10,18] and the stability of responses over time and space [17]. More community-level studies from different agricul- tural regions worldwide are needed to identify if these seemingly idiosyncratic findings can be integrated into global generalities [21]. Further, from a conservation perspective, community-level PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 May 2014 | Volume 9 | Issue 5 | e97029