Munehiro Kitazawa: Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, Nishi 9, Kita 9, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-8589, Japan. ORCID
Yuichi Yamaura: Department of Forest Vegetation, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Forest Research and Management Organization, 1 Matsunosato, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8687, Japan. ORCID
Masayuki Senzaki: Faculty of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, Nishi 5, Kita 10, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-0810, Japan. ORCID
Masashi Hanioka: Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, Nishi 9, Kita 9, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-8589, Japan.
Haruka Ohashi: Department of Wildlife Biology, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Forest Research and Management Organization, 1 Matsunosato, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8687, Japan. ORCID
Michio Oguro: Department of Forest Vegetation, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Forest Research and Management Organization, 1 Matsunosato, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8687, Japan. ORCID
Tetsuya Matsui: Center for Biodiversity and Climate Change, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Forest Research and Management Organization, 1 Matsunosato, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8687, Japan. ORCID
Futoshi Nakamura: Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, Nishi 9, Kita 9, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-8589, Japan. ORCID
Land cover change for agriculture is thought to be a major threat to global biodiversity. However, its ecological impact has rarely been quantified in the Northern Hemisphere, as broad-scale conversion to farmland mainly occurred until the 1400s-1700s in the region, limiting the availability of sufficient data. The Ishikari Lowland in Hokkaido, Japan, offers an excellent opportunity to address this issue, as hunter-gatherer lifestyles dominated this region until the mid-nineteenth century and land cover maps are available for the period of land cover changes (i.e. 1850-2016). Using these maps and a hierarchical community model of relationships between breeding bird abundance and land cover types, we estimated that broad-scale land cover change over a 166-year period was associated with more than 70% decline in both potential species richness and abundance of avian communities. We estimated that the abundance of wetland and forest species declined by greater than 88%, whereas that of bare-ground/farmland species increased by more than 50%. Our results suggest that broad-scale land cover change for agriculture has led to drastic reductions in wetland and forest species and promoted changes in community composition in large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. This study provides potential baseline information that could inform future conservation policies.
