Bird friendly wine country through diversified vineyards.

Vinecology, the integration of ecological and viticultural practices, focuses on the working landscapes of the mediterranean-climate biomes to make wine grape production compatible with species conservation. We examined how maintaining remnant native vegetation and surrounding natural areas in and around vineyards, two primary practices of vinecology, may influence bird community richness and composition across a vineyard landscape. We conducted bird surveys over multiple seasons at 120 sites across a prominent wine-grape growing region of central Chile. The sites were equally divided across vineyards with and without remnant native vegetation and with varying amounts of adjacent natural habitat. We used generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) to examine individual species responses to remnant vegetation in the vineyard at plot scale (50 m radius) given the extent of surrounding natural area at the landscape scale (500-1000 m annular). We used Horn similarity index to explore overall community differences to quantify variations in endemic species, guild detection levels, and species richness between site types. At the plot scale 9 out of 30 species analyzed were positively associated with proportion of remnant vegetation and 3 species were negatively associated. Six were positively influenced by the proportion of native vegetation in the surrounding landscape and 3 species were negatively associated with this landscape scale variable. We found that while overall total detections and richness were significantly greater in continuous mixed forest matorral, 84.9% of the species found there were also detected in forest remnants within vineyards. Endemics, insectivores, granivores, and omnivores were all more abundant in vineyards with remnant native vegetation than in vineyards without remnant native vegetation. Our results show the value of maintaining and restoring natural vegetation remnants in vineyards as a tool for bird conservation that can be applied in working landscapes of the New World Mediterranean (NWM) climate regions. Article Impact Statement: Bird conservation in vineyards is enhanced by small native vegetation patches inside vineyards and by continuous adjacent wildlands. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.