Foraging in a Patchy and Dynamic Landscape: Human Land Use and the White Stork

In the agricultural landscapes of Europe, the White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) prefers to forage on meadows with short vegetation. Thus, food supply for the nestlings and, consequently, breeding success of this central-place forager depend on the temporal and spatial mowing activities of farmers around the nest to generate a patchy and dynamic food availability. Using a spatially explicit model, we study the impact of different land use patterns on food supply and breeding success of a central-place forager. The conclusions of our model are twofold. First, for the White Stork, our model suggests that sequential (asynchronous) mowing increases breeding success compared to the synchronous mowing activities presently applied by farmers. Second and more generally, we conclude that, with increasing heterogeneity and dynamics of the landscape, the patch selection strategy becomes increasingly important for predicting food supply. Thus, landscape-oriented behavior is an important, but often neglected, component of conservation biology and management, especially in agricultural landscapes.