Authors: Rosin, Zuzanna; Pärt, Tomas;Low, Matthew;Kotowska, Dorota;Tobolka, Marcin;Szymański, Paweł;Hiron, Matthew;

Villages are biodiversity rich environments, yet they have received little attention in the context of farmland biodiversity conservation. Similarly, being a type of urban habitat, they have been rarely studied in urban ecology. A substantial component of farmland bird declines come from species linked to human agricultural settlements, and these areas have undergone radical changes due to modernization in the past 50 years. We performed a large-scale study to disentangle the relative impact of two widespread ongoing processes in rural landscapes: village modernization and agricultural land-use intensification. We investigated abundance and species richness of farmland birds in 104 villages and their surrounding crop environments in Poland. Model predictions showed that highly modernized villages and their surrounding agricultural fields had 50–60% fewer birds than those in and around comparable older villages. The relative contribution of modernization versus agricultural intensification to predicted reduction in bird abundance was 88% vs. 12% for birds in villages and 56% vs. 44% in surrounding crops, with high variation among ecological species subsets. Conservation of important habitats linked to villages and rural settlements needs to be urgently developed and included in European Green Deal, Common Agriculture Policy and program for rural development.