| Principal Investigator: | Dr Zoe Davies |
|---|---|
| Co Investigator | Dr Bob Smith |
| Project dates: | 2013-2014 |
| Funding: | Natural England |
| Collaborators: | Natural England, University of Cambridge, University of Southampton, Imperial College London, University of Tennessee, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) |
The majority of our wildlife in England is restricted to fragments of semi-natural habitat that have been shaped by anthropogenic use and management over thousands of years. These sites are critical to the survival of many plants and animals, and will remain important even if the species and communities within them alter in response to climate change. However, small and isolated fragments of habitat are unlikely to provide the resources required to support viable populations of these species in the long-term, resulting in local extinctions.
A series of recent high-profile government reports (‘Making Space for Nature’, ‘UK National Ecosystem Assessment’ and the Natural Environment White Paper) have emphasised the need to modify our present approach to conservation. They propose a new proactive trajectory, based on improving the coherence of England’s ecological networks through landscape-scale habitat restoration and re-creation, rather than the more reactive and traditional focus on small-scale site-based conservation. Given the restricted funding available for conservation, the issue of how we should prioritise such interventions in order to create large conservation areas (e.g. expand the extent of existing sites, versus increase the number of sites) has thus come to the fore.
The aim of this project is to provide an evidence-base to support future landscape-scale conservation decision-making and implementation. In particular, this project will use existing data to investigate the costs and benefits of the different types of large conservation area that already exist in England, and so identify when and where these different approaches are most applicable.
The four broad aims of this project are:
- To draw together and review published studies that examine the biodiversity, social and economic costs and benefits associated with creating large conservation areas in the UK
- To consider how systematic conservation planning approaches have been used to evaluate biodiversity-socioeconomic trade-offs and help meet conservation targets when developing ecological networks elsewhere in the world
- To determine where different types of large conservation area are found in the UK and understand the biodiversity, geographic and socio-economic factors that best explain this spatial pattern
- To undertake analyses, using existing datasets, to ascertain the biodiversity, economic and social costs, benefits and trade-offs that may be related to establishing and maintaining different types of large conservation area