Impact of the land cover change on the abundance of farmland birds

The European landscape has been changed in the last decades and this process has different characteristics with different drivers in West and Central East Europe. In this study I analysed the land cover and land use change in two study areas (Hungary, Schleswig-Holstein) and its impact on the abundance data of a representative bird species of European agrarian landscapes, the Eurasian skylark. Generalized Linear Models were used to estimate the land cover effects in R Statistics software. ArcGis 10.3 were used for the spatial data analysis. Arable lands and pastures are habitat areas, while the forests, built up areas and water surfaces are the nonpreferred areas of the skylark. According to our findings, the different changes of preferred and non-preferred land cover categories have strong effect on the population of the skylark in country and European scale