1. An increasing number of studies are examining the distribution and congruence of ecosystem services, often with the goal of identifying areas that will provide multiple ecosystem service ' ...hotspots'. However, there is a paucity of data on most ecosystem services, so proxies (e. g. estimates of a service for a particular land cover type) are frequently used to map their distribution. To date, there has been little attempt to quantify the effects of using proxies on distribution maps of ecosystem services, despite the potentially large errors associated with such data sets. 2. Here, we provide the first study examining the effects of using proxies on ecosystem service maps and the degree of spatial congruence of these maps with primary data, using England as a case study. 3. We show that land cover based proxies provide a poor fit to primary data surfaces for biodiversity, recreation and carbon storage, and that correlations between ecosystem services change depending on whether primary or proxy data are used for the analyses. 4. The poor fit of proxies to primary data was also evident when we selected hotspots of single ecosystem services, and consistency between raw and modelled surfaces was extremely low when considering the locations that were coincident hotspots for multiple services. 5. Synthesis and applications. Proxies may be suitable for identifying broad-scale trends in ecosystem services, but even relatively good proxies are likely to be unsuitable for identifying hotspots or priority areas for multiple services.
Many species are extending their leading‐edge (cool) range margins polewards in response to recent climate change. In the present study, we investigated range margin changes at the northern (cool) ...range margins of 1573 southerly‐distributed species from 21 animal groups in Great Britain over the past four decades of climate change, updating previous work. Depending on data availability, range margin changes were examined over two time intervals during the past four decades. For four groups (birds, butterflies, macromoths, and dragonflies and damselflies), there were sufficient data available to examine range margin changes over both time intervals. We found that most taxa shifted their northern range margins polewards and this finding was not greatly influenced by changes in recorder effort. The mean northwards range margin change in the first time interval was 23 km per decade (N = 13 taxonomic groups) and, in the second interval, was 18 km per decade (N = 16 taxonomic groups) during periods when the British climate warmed by 0.21 and 0.28 °C per decade, respectively. For the four taxa examined over both intervals, there was evidence for higher rate of range margin change in the more recent time interval in the two Lepidoptera groups. Our analyses confirm a continued range margin shift polewards in a wide range of taxonomic groups.
Across society there is pressure to assess and reduce carbon emissions to meet the obligations of the Paris Agreement and the Glasgow Climate Pact. Within the science community, there is increasing ...awareness of the carbon footprint of research activities, but to date there is no consideration of emissions associated with biodiversity monitoring.
Biodiversity monitoring, often delivered through citizen science schemes, is key to assessing environmental change impacts and mitigation. However, attributes of rigorously designed schemes such as randomisation and high recording effort can require volunteers to undertake regular travel, raising two important questions: (a) is biodiversity monitoring reliant on volunteers with private vehicles?; and (b) what is the carbon footprint of a typical monitoring scheme?
This study focussed on travel associated with participation in the UK Breeding Bird Survey. The BBS involves twice‐annual surveys of a stratified random sample of 1‐km squares across the United Kingdom, providing population trends for c. 120 terrestrial bird species with data used widely in policy and research. Using coverage information from 2019, we calculated road distances from volunteers' home addresses to their squares and sought information on travel methods using an online questionnaire (54% response rate).
In 2019, 2765 volunteers made 7520 visits to 3914 1‐km squares, travelling over 286,000 km in the process. Travel required to visit individual squares was highly skewed and differed geographically and according to mode of travel. Eighty‐eight per cent of squares were accessed by private car, with conventionally fuelled vehicles accounting for 95% of these. Active travel accounted for 10% of visits and public transport only 1.4%. We estimate the total emissions produced to achieve BBS coverage in 2019 to be at least 46.8 tonnes CO2e.
These results indicate a heavy reliance on access to private vehicles, creating a barrier to future participation, especially if pathways to decarbonisation involve reduced car ownership. Furthermore, they indicate the scale of carbon emissions likely to be produced by the monitoring sector. We discuss possible pathways to decarbonise monitoring schemes but stress that we do not wish to criticise the travel decisions of individual volunteers: the onus on decarbonisation lies firmly with the organisers of monitoring schemes.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Conservation planners often wish to predict how species distributions will change in response to environmental changes. Species distribution models (SDMs) are the primary tool for making such ...predictions. Many methods are widely used; however, they all make simplifying assumptions, and predictions can therefore be subject to high uncertainty. With global change well underway, field records of observed range shifts are increasingly being used for testing SDM transferability. We used an unprecedented distribution dataset documenting recent range changes of British vascular plants, birds, and butterflies to test whether correlative SDMs based on climate change provide useful approximations of potential distribution shifts. We modelled past species distributions from climate using nine single techniques and a consensus approach, and projected the geographical extent of these models to a more recent time period based on climate change; we then compared model predictions with recent observed distributions in order to estimate the temporal transferability and prediction accuracy of our models. We also evaluated the relative effect of methodological and taxonomic variation on the performance of SDMs. Models showed good transferability in time when assessed using widespread metrics of accuracy. However, models had low accuracy to predict where occupancy status changed between time periods, especially for declining species. Model performance varied greatly among species within major taxa, but there was also considerable variation among modelling frameworks. Past climatic associations of British species distributions retain a high explanatory power when transferred to recent time--due to their accuracy to predict large areas retained by species--but fail to capture relevant predictors of change. We strongly emphasize the need for caution when using SDMs to predict shifts in species distributions: high explanatory power on temporally-independent records--as assessed using widespread metrics--need not indicate a model's ability to predict the future.
•Measuring connectivity is crucial for informing conservation management.•We develop a new technique using long-term monitoring data.•Butterfly connectivity has increased by 64% in recent ...years.•Connectivity in birds has remained stable over time.•Our indicator provides a ‘species-eye-view’ of connectivity.
Habitat loss is a significant driver of biodiversity loss, causing fragmentation into small, isolated patches of suitable land cover. This reduces the permeability of landscapes to the movement of individuals and reduces the likelihood of metapopulation persistence. Quantifying functional connectivity, the ability of a focal species to move between resource patches, is therefore essential for conservation management. There is substantial evidence supporting a technique based on ‘population synchrony’- the degree of correlation in time-series of annual population growth rates between different long-term monitoring sites, to provide a measure of functional connectivity. However, synchronised population dynamics are not only driven by the movement of individuals between sites, but also shared environmental conditions which must be accounted for. Here, we use species survey data from over four decades to investigate average levels and temporal trends in population synchrony for 58 British bird and butterfly species. We first show that population synchrony is significantly associated with synchrony in some seasonal climatic variables. Once we accounted for spatiotemporal climatic patterns, we found that synchrony in butterflies declined over time by 71% between 1985 and 2000 but increased by 64% in recent years. Synchrony in birds showed some decline between 1999 and 2005, after which there appears to being recovery, however most species (74%) show no significant overall change in synchrony. Our proposed indicator provides a ‘species-eye-view’ of functional connectivity using widely available abundance data. Developing such indicators of functional connectivity, which can be updated annually, is crucial to improve the effectiveness of land management strategies for conservation under increasing environmental change.
Housing a growing human population is a global issue and designing environmentally friendly developments requires identifying the species likely to be negatively impacted and finding mitigation ...solutions. Existing studies that consider fragmentation of natural habitats have limited application in countries such as Britain where a prime target for development is agricultural land where decades of intensive management have already diminished biodiversity. Here I used citizen science data on the abundance of 146 breeding and wintering birds to develop models linking abundance to human population density and habitat features. I used these as a proxy for the urbanisation process, finding that impacts of urbanisation were species-specific and context dependent. Low-density developments benefited a high proportion of birds, with wetland birds benefitting most and farmland birds least, but as human densities increased further, up to 75% of species were negatively impacted. Almost half of species currently occurring at 14 flagship residential development sites were predicted to decline based on projected human population density increases, with a third predicted to increase. Presence of wetlands, canopy cover and patches of trees all benefited certain species but efforts to identify more detailed habitat associations were hampered by collinearity among variables. I conclude that even in heavily degraded agricultural landscapes, a high proportion of species will be negatively impacted by residential development and that some will require spared land to persist in the wider landscape. As no single habitat benefited the entire bird community, urban planners wishing to design bird-friendly developments will need to make difficult decisions over which aspects of the bird community to prioritise.
Migratory birds are subject to many pressures during their life cycle and many are declining as a consequence. Evidence from North America shows that for species that migrate at night, bright ...artificial light sources associated with urban areas can disrupt natural movement patterns, leading to direct and indirect fitness consequences. Comparable evidence for species and urban areas in Europe is limited. This study aimed to measure the response of nocturnally migrating thrushes to artificial light at night in the UK. We used passive acoustic recorders deployed across a gradient of artificial lighting to record the flight calls of three thrush species, with an expectation of greater call rates over brightly lit areas. We trained a convolutional neural network automatically to locate and identify thrush calls in the audio recordings, achieving area under the curve (AUC) values in withheld validation data of 0.93–0.98, and recall on independent field data of 85–94%, depending on species. Seasonal patterns of call rates were positively correlated across sites but there were large differences in absolute rates between sites. Call rates were up to five times higher over the brightest urban areas compared with darker villages, suggesting a strong phototaxic effect of artificial light at night on migratory thrushes. These results confirm that monitoring of flight calls can provide valuable information on the timing of nocturnal migration, but that the effects of artificial lighting must be taken into account in any comparisons of abundance across sites. European cities are not blighted by mass mortality of migrants striking illuminated buildings; even so, these results show that nocturnal migrants are influenced by light pollution. Ascertaining whether this has fitness consequences is a priority so as to inform the design and illumination of future urban areas.
Projected impacts of climate change on the populations and distributions of species pose a challenge for conservationists. In response, a number of adaptation strategies to enable species to persist ...in a changing climate have been proposed. Management to maximise the quality of habitat at existing sites may reduce the magnitude or frequency of climate‐driven population declines. In addition large‐scale management of landscapes could potentially improve the resilience of populations by facilitating inter‐population movements. A reduction in the obstacles to species’ range expansion, may also allow species to track changing conditions better through shifts to new locations, either regionally or locally. However, despite a strong theoretical base, there is limited empirical evidence to support these management interventions. This makes it difficult for conservationists to decide on the most appropriate strategy for different circumstances. Here extensive data from long‐term monitoring of woodland birds at individual sites are used to examine the two‐way interactions between habitat and both weather and population count in the previous year. This tests the extent to which site‐scale and landscape‐scale habitat attributes may buffer populations against variation in winter weather (a key driver of woodland bird population size) and facilitate subsequent population growth. Our results provide some support for the prediction that landscape‐scale attributes (patch isolation and area of woodland habitat) may influence the ability of some woodland bird species to withstand weather‐mediated population declines. These effects were most apparent among generalist woodland species. There was also evidence that several, primarily specialist, woodland species are more likely to increase following population decline where there is more woodland at both site and landscape scales. These results provide empirical support for the concept that landscape‐scale conservation efforts may make the populations of some woodland bird species more resilient to climate change. However in isolation, management is unlikely to provide a universal benefit to all species.
Many studies have demonstrated the selection of stubble fields by farmland birds in winter, but none have shown whether provisioning of this key habitat positively influences national population ...trends for widespread farmland birds. We use two complementary extensive bird surveys undertaken at the same localities in summer and winter and show that the area of stubble in winter attracts increased numbers of several bird species of conservation concern. Moreover, for several farmland specialists, the availability of stubble fields in winter positively influenced the 10 year breeding population trend (1994-2003) whereas hedgerow bird species were less affected. For skylarks and yellowhammers, initially negative trends showed recovery with 10-20 ha of stubble per 1 km square. Thus, agri-environment schemes that promote retention of over-winter stubbles will attract birds locally and are capable of reversing current population declines if stubbles are available in sufficient quantity.
Information on the status of biodiversity is crucial for species conservation and management. Large scale assessments are only feasible through citizen science but some taxa are poorly monitored ...because few people specialise in them. We explore alleviating this problem by using data collected for poorly monitored species as an add-on to existing bird surveys. Since 1995, participants in the annual Breeding Bird Survey have recorded the abundance of mammals during their surveys. We demonstrate the value of these data by developing spatial models of relative abundance for nine common and easily detected mammal species. Rabbit, brown hare and mountain hare all showed widespread declines. Conversely, deer showed increases throughout their ranges, with the exception of the red deer whose population was predominantly stable. The grey squirrel continues to increase in several areas. The red fox, the only carnivore with enough data, showed significant large declines. The collection of data on taxa other than the primary target has particular merit where the secondary taxa can be detected effectively by methods devised for the core survey. In such cases the data are inexpensive and inherit some of the benefits of the underlying structure and power of the core survey. However, the efficacy of the primary study design may vary for the members of secondary taxa and may not be temporally or spatially suitable for all of them. Although more volunteer training may be required, there are also opportunities to engage and enthuse people about conservation issues of other species groups.
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