Het belang van open landschap voor vogels

One of the main features of the Dutch landscape is its openness, made famous by such painters as Rembrandt, van Goyen and Van Ruisdael. In this paper, we argue for the preservation of this openness and seek to answer the question which mechanism underlies habitat choice in species of open landscapes worldwide. We furthermore searched for studies where the effect of a change in landscape openness was purposely researched by actively changing the landscape. Finally, we hypothesized how the disappearance of openness can result in the disappearance of species of the open countryside. Many species, mainly waterbirds and shorebirds, use open landscapes as main habitat, not only in the breeding season but also outside. It seems that especially a fear of predation results in this usage, although visibility for conspecifics is important in lekking species. Few field experiments have been carried out to examine the importance of openness: the few results point towards distributional shifts in the species of open landscapes. We postulate that the area sensitivity of species of open areas is responsible for the observed patterns.