Burning or cutting? Comparing methods for bird conservation in the reedbeds of Lake Neusiedl/Fertő

Lake Neusiedl/Fertő has Europe’s second-largest reed area (180 km²), and it is home to some of the largest populations of reed birds on the continent. In recent years, reed die-back and the extensive formation of a thick litter layer of broken reed have led to a dramatic decline in some reed bird species. Management measures to renew reedbeds and conserve their avifauna include reed burning, but this practice faces legal challenges in Austria. To get a first assessment of the feasibility of fire management, we compared reedbeds that had been burnt one year before with old reedbed sites and regularly harvested sites based on abundance indices of a set of characteristic reed bird species. This was achieved by conducting point counts in burnt and old reedbeds, and by comparing our results with counts in harvested areas, which involved a total of 88 point count locations. Our results show that the abundance patterns of the focal species in the burnt area are similar to those in the cut areas. However, there were differences as well, for example, the Water Rail (Rallus aquaticus) was significantly more abundant at the burnt site. As expected, we found fewer “old reed specialists” in the burnt area compared to the old reed sites. Although this study provides only a snapshot of the spatio-temporal processes in the reed belt, our findings suggest that burning does not have a negative impact on the bird assemblage compared to reed harvesting.