Biodiversity Conservation in Traditional Farming Landscapes the Future of Birds and Large Carnivores in Transylvania
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Biodiversity conservation in traditional farming landscapes The future of birds and large carnivores in Transylvania Doctoral thesis by Ine Dorresteijn Biodiversity conservation in traditional farming landscapes The future of birds and large carnivores in Transylvania Academic dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Sustainability of Leuphana University for the award of the degree ‘Doctor of Natural Sciences’ -Dr. rer. nat.- Submitted by Ine Dorresteijn Born on 15.05.1984 in Utrecht (The Netherlands) Date of submission: 09.01.2015 Doctoral advisor and reviewer: Prof. Dr. Joern Fischer Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Tobias Kuemmerle Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Kristoffer Hylander Date of disputation: 29 May 2015 Copyright notice Chapters II-IX, and Appendix I & II have either been published or are in preparation for publication in international scientific journals. Copyright of the text and the illustrations is with the author or the authors of the respective chapter. The publishers own the exclusive right to publish or to use the text and illustrations for their purposes. Reprint of any part of this dissertation requires permission of the copyright holders. Photo credits: Jan Hanspach (cover page; page 14, Fig 1.2a,b,d), Nathanaël Vetter (page 33), and Rémi Bigonneau & Anne-Catherine Klein (page 155, 187), all other photos by Ine Dorresteijn © Ine Dorresteijn (Chapters I, II, V & IX) © Springer (Chapter III & IV) © Elsevier (Chapters VI & Appendix II) © Public Library of Science (Chapters VII & Appendix I) © International Association for Bear Research and Management (Chapter VIII) Author΄s address: Leuphana University, Faculty of Sustainability Science Scharnhorststrasse 1, 21335 Lueneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Acknowledgements ‘Even the woodpecker owes his success to the fact that he uses his head and keeps pecking away until he finishes the job he starts’ – Coleman Cox I quite often felt like this woodpecker during my PhD, and I would still be pecking away if it wasn’t for the many people that helped from the start to the finish of my PhD. First of all I wish to thank my supervisor Joern Fischer. This PhD would not have been possible without him. Joern supported, encouraged, and inspired me, and he has given me irreplaceable guidance and advice at every stage of the PhD. Thanks for sometimes keeping me on the ground, but also for giving me the space to carry out my ideas, even if that meant more time in the field. I am grateful to the entire team for their support during my PhD, but most of all just for making me part of the team. Jan Hanspach provided important guidance throughout the PhD. Many thanks for helping, listening, and handling my impatience, especially with R. Also thanks to Henrik von Wehrden for helping me through several statistical and GIS problems. I learned a lot about the region from Tibor Hartel, but also had a great time with him during my first month in the field. Thanks to Dave Abson for proofreading the first chapter of this dissertation, and together with Julia Leventon and Heike Zimmermann for creating a nice atmosphere and many serious and not so serious discussions. Thanks to my fellow PhD-students Jacqueline Loos, Andra Milcu, Friederieke Mikulcak, and Marlene Roellig for sharing all the ups and downs, frustrations and laughs, invaluable discussions, chocolates and cookies, and for being my friends during the past years. I also had the pleasure to work with two bright bachelor students. Being able to discover the world of identifying birds by their song together with Lunja Ernst was incredibly helpful. Thanks to Lucas Teixeira for helping me with data entry, data analyses, and making fieldwork at night look easy and fun – it was great having you around for so long. This dissertation arises from a large amount of data collected in the field. None of this would have been possible without the help of the most awesome field team, and a big thanks to all of you! Cathy Klein spent nine months with me in the field and deserves special thanks. Having such a reliable, hardworking, and funny good friend by my side was the best recipe for two successful field seasons. Joris Tinnemans was tireless in the field and while sorting camera pictures and with his humour made both years a lot of fun. Rémi Bigonneau did a fantastic job on the bird surveys and made the best barbecues for the team. Arpad Szapanyos was indispensable at several stages during my time in Romania and I could always count on him. Thanks to Cosmin Moga for helping with the bird surveys when the migrants arrived, but also for the wines in the evenings. Hans Hedrich did an incredible job with the interviews and translations and had the superb skill of making people feel comfortable during the interviews. Annamarie Krieg, you were a sunshine in the field house even after long days of anthill counting in the heat. Ben Scheele and Alexander Fletcher were crazy enough to spend their holidays counting anthills and I very much appreciate their efforts. Also thanks to Jenny Long who spent part of her holidays setting out camera traps and sorting pictures. Martin Bubner and Frank Dietrich were a hardworking and dependable team, and fortunately also knew how to fix the lights in our field house. Nate Vetter and Frans Meeuwsen reinforced the team with new energy in the last month of fieldwork and without their help we would not have been able to finish our ambitious camera trap plan. Thanks to Kuno and Annemarie Martini for opening their house to us in Sighisoara. I am especially grateful to all respondents that participated in the interviews, the people whose land we accessed for our fieldwork, and the people that helped with directions, cars, or any other problem encountered in the field. I am also thankful to our partner organizations in Romania. I enjoyed the collaboration with The Milvus-group in Targu Mures very much, and would like to thank all the people that collected data on bear activity. In particular, I would like to thank Attila Kecskés, Hana Latková, Zsófia Mezey, and Szilárd Sugár, with whom I worked closely for Chapter IV of this dissertation. My thanks also go to the Mihai Eminescu Trust, especially Caroline Fernolend and Oliviu Marian, for their help and logistical support. I would like to thank all my co-authors for their help with the preparations of the different manuscripts. I would especially like to thank Euan Ritchie and Dale Nimmo. Euan made it possible for me to spend a month in his working group at Deakin University to learn more about trophic ecology and have an overall amazing experience in Australia. Thanks to Dale for his valuable input on several manuscripts and also for letting me live in his house while I was in Australia. Thanks to Laura Kehoe and Tobias Kuemmerle for providing extra camera traps and driving them all the way down to Romania. This research would not have been possible without funding. I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the International Association for Bear Research and Management for funding our research. Most of the research was funded through a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to Joern Fischer. The International Association for Bear Research and Management funded the interview work and made this interdisciplinary dissertation possible. Finally, thanks to all friends and family that reminded me of also having a life next to the PhD. Thanks to the Schultner family for their interest and support, and for providing me with the most delicious energy packages when times were busy. A warm thanks go to my brother, sister, and sister-in-law – Bram, Marleen, and Dorien Dorresteijn – for always showing interest in my work and their visits to Germany. I am grateful to my parents, Leo and Joyce Dorresteijn for their support and encouragements, but also for visiting me wherever I decide to go, and for moving my stuff to those places. A loving thanks to Jannik Schultner who was my rock during my PhD years, kept me sane at especially more stressful times, let me rant when I wanted too, but also made this time wonderful! Preface This dissertation is presented as a series of manuscripts based on empirical research carried out in Transylvania, Romania. Chapter I provides a general overview of the dissertation, including the overarching goal and specific aims, a summary of all included manuscripts, a synthesis of the results identifying system properties that facilitate biodiversity conservation in traditional farming landscapes, and finally an outlook for conservation priorities in traditional farming landscapes. Beyond Chapter I, the manuscripts included in this dissertation (Chapters II-IX) are divided into three sections (A, B, and C). Section A examines the effects of local and landscape scale land-use patterns on birds and large carnivores and how these animals may be affected by future land-use change (Chapters II-V). To gauge the role of traditional land-use elements for biodiversity, in Section B, I focus on wood pastures as one prominent example of such traditional elements (Chapters VI-VIII). Lastly, in section C, I use a social-ecological systems approach to understand social drivers underlying human-bear coexistence (Chapters IV and IX). With the exception of Chapter II, all manuscripts are either published, in revision, or under review in international scientific journals. I, the author of this dissertation, conducted the majority of the research presented in this dissertation and am the lead author of the manuscripts presented in Chapters II- V, VII, and IX. I provided important contributions to Chapters VI and VIII as a co-author. A reference to the journal each manuscript is submitted to and the contributing co-authors is presented on the title page of each chapter.