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Wetland creation is a common conservation practice to mitigate biodiversity loss, caused by global wetland destruction. Despite this, there is a lack of large-scale evaluations of how created wetland characteristics and landscape context relate to bird diversity and reproductive success. We inventoried 89 created wetlands (0.2–20 ha) in central Sweden to investigate which local and landscape components were associated with breeding wetland bird species richness, pair abundance and reproductive success. Wetland size was positively associated with species richness, pair abundance and chick abundance. However, several small (1 ha) wetlands taken together were similar to or exceeded individual large wetlands of similar total wetland area, in terms of species richness, pair abundance, and chicks produced. While species richness showed a clear negative relationship with the proportion of the adjacent 50 m …