Farmland wetlands

The loss of farmland wetlands caused many wetland species to decline rapidly. To mitigate this loss the government decided to allocate resources for the restoration of natural wetlands and for the creation of new wetlands. More than one hundred million euro have now been invested in wetland restoration and creation projects across Sweden, but no large-scale evaluation of the effects of these measures on wetland biodiversity has been done. Because many of these wetland projects should improve the conditions for wetland bird diversity we aimed to: (i) compile data on all known farmland wetland restoration projects, including coastal meadows, (ii) compile data on all wetland bird inventories since c. 1990 and especially search for before-after restoration inventories, (iii) investigate whether we can use opportunistic “presenceonly” data from the Species Observation System (SOS, Artportalen) collected between 2006 and 2015 to evaluate the effects of restorations on wetland bird communities, (iv) evaluate the effects of wetland restorations on bird communities, (v) investigate how to create wetlands to improve for wetland birds and (vi) investigate whether wetland restorations also attract large grazing birds that may cause crop damage and conflicts between biodiversity conservation and farming.