BIODIVERSITY MONITORING IN THE UK
UK Monitoring Challenge • A small densely populated landscape – 243,620 km2 254 people/km2
• Land parcels are small – often a few hectares • Land cover changes little – Proportion of urban is increasing
• Land/water body management change is the most • •
important driver of biodiversity change Pollution and climate gradients quite strong Priority species and habitats (sites) scattered across the landscape in many small patches, and a few large areas
Monitoring Ecosystems, Biomes and Habitats • Land cover maps •
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• 1990, 2000, 2007 • Derived from satellite data, and classified with other data sets e.g. soil, and the national digital boundary data set.
Habitats, vegetation, soils, water sample survey – 600 1km squares, professional, 2007, 1998, 1990, 1984, 1978 – ‘Countryside Survey’ – http://www.countrysidesurvey.org.uk/
LTER - meteorology, biodiversity, soils, chemistry, experiments – 12 terrestrial, 45 freshwater – ‘Environmental Change Network’ – http://www.ecn.ac.uk/
Why monitor biomes-habitats in this way? •
Land cover stock and change drives the biggest decisions on priority for policy (e.g. deforestation), whilst maps allow planning of effort. – In the UK change is mostly in management that makes subtle change to land cover – It is hard to pick this up from satellite as change is at a fine spatial scale and at small differences in classification – We need something better!
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Sampling vegetation to a stratified random design – Attributes of plant species (e.g. response to nutrients, grazing) allow changes in vegetation to be related to pollutants and management change – It allows the UK to generate nationally representative statistics showing whether these pressures are reducing or enhancing biodiversity.
Detailed ecological monitoring and experiments – Are being use to relate the condition of habitats to their services e.g. carbon sequestration
Monitoring trends in selected species •
Breeding Birds
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Butterflies
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3,000 1km squares, 2,500 volunteers do the sampling, 3 times a year ‘Breeding Bird Survey’ http://www.bto.org/bbs/index.htm http://www.ebcc.info/pecbm.html
– 1,000 transects, annual, many 100s volunteers do the sampling, 16 times a year (and 2 times) – ‘Butterfly Monitoring Scheme’ – http://www.ukbms.org/
Collating presence data (distributions) – – – –
120,000 species 50+ million observations from 1,000s of volunteers Trends possible for around 30,000 species The ‘Biological Records Centre’ and ‘National Biodiversity Network’ http://www.brc.ac.uk/ , http://data.nbn.org.uk/ , http://www.jncc.gov.uk/ page-5091
Why monitor these selected species? •
The species are selected to:
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The stratified random design for sample locations allows robust representative trends.
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– Be easy and cheap to sample allowing high sample numbers – Have a good range of species within each sample location – Ecology well-established so change can be interpreted.
– The monitoring schemes provide trends that are compiled into the UK’s biodiversity indicator set.
Analysis can relate the trends to land management changes – The ability to show effects of production land management on trends has driven policy (for example the use of incentives)
The high sample numbers mean the data are easy to relate to other environmental data – The data can be analysed with modelled climate and agricultural data sets derived at different scales, – This flexibility allows the monitoring to provide measures of the response of biodiversity to climate change, links to many detailed policies e.g. wood fuel production.
Monitoring status of threatened species • 1150 species, highlighted as priorities for conservation • • • •
actions under the UK biodiversity action plan Many of these are outside protected sites and scattered at a few locations Cannot be picked up by main sample based monitoring Most would need specific monitoring methods Too costly to monitor them all – Risk based monitoring is being trialled – monitor species where existing knowledge is weak and threats judged as high – NGOs have a big role – Many are probably informally monitored by volunteers and local staff, a goal is to make this information repeatable and available
• We believe our selected species and habitat monitoring would pick up the widespread threats to these species.
Monitoring of protected sites •
UK sites
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Site condition monitoring
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– 6,700 sites, 2.4 million hectares – Many small sites – each a few hectares, few large – several square kilometres – http://www.jncc.gov.uk/page-2201 – A means of judging condition where the habitats and species vary across sites – A means of comparing assessments made by different organisations at different locations (e.g. by the different countries in the UK)
How does it work? – Measurable attributes for the species and habitats important at the site are chosen – Attributes include population size, or habitat structure or composition – Target values or ranges for the attributes are set which equal the desired condition – The fit of the monitoring results with the targets is used to judge condition categories (favourable, unfavourable, destroyed) – Guidance informs the choice of attributes for species and habitats in order to have consistency but allowing local flexibility – Threats and management measures also recorded
Initially applied across all sites over 6 years – Now moving to a frequency based on risk – this means monitoring where the combination of the level of knowledge is low and the level of threat is high
Summary of experience • Current long term monitoring doesn’t address all the • • •
questions Need to identify what it can tell us and identify the gaps Rebalance effort as needed (sampling strategy) – but difficult Rarer species need a special approach – risk based