More Annual Croplands Means Less Eastern Meadowlarks

Sadly, there has been a decrease of wildlife-friendly pasture lands across central Canada turning in to annual cropland.

New research by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF) shows a large and increased conversion of perennial pasture and forage to annual cropland across the Mixedwood Plains Ecozone in Ontario and Quebec.

The Canadian Wildlife Federation’s research linked this change to declines in the Eastern Meadowlark population. Due to this, CWF is calling for improved policies to support producers who retain natural habitat on farmland and reduce the impacts of urban sprawl.

The study was published in the October, 2024 issue of FACETS, the journal of the Royal Society of Canada’s Academy of Science. It examined land use in the Mixedwood Plains along Lakes Huron, Erie and Ontario, and the St. Lawrence River into southern portions of Quebec along the St. Lawrence lowlands. In this area, Meadowlarks are in decline. In fact, they are listed as Threatened by Canada’s Species at Risk Act and Ontario’s Endangered Species Act.

The Changing Agricultural Landscape

As well as measuring the shift from pasture and forage to annual crops, the Canadian Wildlife Federation also asessed the dynamics among agricultural lands and other land covers between the years 2011 and 2022. CWF used this data to help predict biodiversity implications by providing a case study on Eastern Meadowlarks.

Pastures and hay fields — valuable to biodiversity and imperiled species like the Eastern Meadowlark — have declined by more than 25 per cent over the study period. This decline is due primarily to the conversion to annual crops like corn and soy. Similarly, the habitat needed to support the Eastern Meadowlarks declined by approximately 20 per cent over the same time and space. This Meadowlark habitat decline overlapped with pasture and forage losses.

In addition to farmland conversion, an area of farmland the size of Toronto has been lost to urban sprawl over the decade — thousands of hectares of forests and wetlands have been converted to farmland.

Grassland Songbirds

Tallgrass prairies and savannahs once covered large portions of the Mixedwood Plains Ecozone. But those habitats have been reduced to less than three per cent of their historic extent. As prairies and savannahs were converted, grassland species like the Eastern Meadowlark began to nest in the expanding agricultural landscape. At the time, this was dominated by a combination of pastures and hay fields. By the twentieth century, advances in agricultural technology and crops saw a large shift towards growing annual crops resulting in pastures and hay fields disappearing from the landscape.

Presently, the shift from pastures and forage crops to annual crops is happening at a rapid rate. In the absence of the native grasslands and savannahs, many birds, mammals, insects and plants that rely on grasslands face extirpation (total extinction in a specific area) if suitable farmland habitats are not conserved or grassland habitat restored.

Natural Solutions

But there are some natural solutions that can help:

• Land use policies should consider impacts on biodiversity and agricultural production by exploring options to limit the expansion of urban boundaries onto farmlands and natural land covers as well as the expansion of farmlands onto natural land covers.
• Development of federal and provincial agricultural policies incentivizing the retention of biodiverse habitats on farms as a public good provided by agricultural producers in the Mixedwood Plains Ecozone could contribute to halting and reversing biodiversity loss.

As demand for housing and food production grows, there is an increased importance of well-designed policies to reduce the impacts of urban sprawl and support farmers in maintaining natural habitats and biodiversity.

Learn more about the work the Canadian Wildlife Federation is doing for wildlife on our agricultural lands.