We aimed to identify the effect of oak agro-forestry management on “Montado” biodiversity as indicator for ecological status of “Montado” landscape.
A recently developed spatially explicit Stochastic Dynamic Methodology (StDM) was applied to model the spatial and temporal patterns of the land use/land cover changes and predict responses in biodiversity patterns, with a focus on passerine functional traits (grassland, woodland and generalist species richness), considering scenarios with and without oak agro-forestry management.
Model outputs showed that oak agro-forestry management favored the expansion of oak agro-forestry at the expense of other land uses, mainly oak forest and agricultural areas. On the other hand, passerine richness exhibits a gradual decline facing the intensification of oak agro-forestry management practices, with higher declining rate observed for grassland passerine species.
The oak agro-forestry management does not seem to improve the ecological status of “Montado” landscape, and neither does its abandonment. Hence the conservation paradigm should focus on improving the multi-functionality of the system than merely focusing on a single and common land use