Designated Fields Could Reduce Crop Damage Caused by Barnacle Geese

A team of researchers from the University of Turku and the Natural Resources Institute Finland has examined the foraging behavior of barnacle geese in Northern Karelia, Finland. In this region, geese feeding on agricultural fields cause significant economic damage to farms.

Published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the researchers' findings suggest that the combined use of areas where geese are not disturbed and no-go areas where geese are repelled from fields can help to mitigate the damage to crops as well as the local human-wildlife conflict.

In Finland, barnacle geese are responsible for most of the agricultural damage caused by protected species, and the Finnish government pays annually up to €4 million in compensation to farmers.

"Most of these compensations were paid to farmers in Northern and Southern Karelia, an important region in Finland for dairy farming, reflecting the local intensity of this human-wildlife conflict. We need effective strategies to proactively mitigate the conflict and methods to minimize the damage," says Professor Jukka Forsman from the Natural Resources Institute Finland.

One possible solution is establishing accommodation fields where some areas are devoted to geese and others are no-go areas where the geese are repelled. The idea is to centralize geese and damage to certain areas and protect important crops elsewhere. The accommodation and repelling fields are selected jointly by farmers and authorities.

In this study, fields were designated into three groups: normal crop fields where no goose management took place, accommodation fields, and repelling fields. Geese were trapped and equipped with GPS transmitters that allowed for following their habitat use.