Robust conservation for a dynamic world

The need to understand how human life and biodiversity can coexist has never been more urgent. Humans are transforming environments at a pace that other species have never evolved to cope with, and no area of the planet is left untouched. While conservation efforts have traditionally focused on vulnerable rare species, the recent declines in abundance and range sizes of formerly common species are perhaps even more worrying. Recent prescriptions for a 'liveable planet' assert that we need to conserve 30-50% of the land surface as seminatural ecosystems. However, if leaders are to agree to this target, they will need more quantitative evidence that it is necessary, and of the consequences of continuing with business-as-usual.

The vast majority of conservation plans implemented around the world are underpinned by a categorisation of the land into discrete habitats (for example grassland as a broad habitat, or unimproved calcareous grassland as a more specific habitat). Information about the occurrence of species is also used. However there are well-documented flaws with both of these approaches. "Habitats" vary hugely in quality from the points of view of the species that inhabit them, and the current discrete classifications will become increasingly meaningless as communities are remoulded by human-induced changes. Conserving species as the building blocks of ecosystems is in principle more reliable, but there are just so many species, most of them poorly recorded, that planning for them individually is unfeasible and prone to bias.

Alarmingly, no-one has systematically tested, for more than a handful of species, whether a proposed large-scale plan for conservation protection can feasibly maintain the species' abundance and range size in the long term. This fellowship will address that challenge, and build the scientific foundation for reliable, validated conservation plans that are applicable around the world. I will harness biological understanding of the mechanisms that allow species to survive where they have an adequate amount, quality, and connectivity of habitat. I will use new mathematical and statistical techniques to simplify the overwhelming complexity of myriad species, interacting with each other and with the environment.

I will for the first time use species population dynamics to test the performance of conservation plans that used current methods based only on where species/habitats occur. This will quantify which types of species are served better or worse by making such simplifying assumptions. To achieve this I will compile a unique database synthesising hundreds of studies of spatial population dynamics. Expressing the results of these studies in a common currency will unlock new large-scale ecological insights that couldn't be achieved any other way.

In parallel to this, I will develop a new method for synthesising complex ecological data to produce conservation plans that will be robust in a dynamic world. The method will maintain the conceptual simplicity of mapping a limited number of "habitat networks", but will be based on optimised combinations of multivariate species' and environmental data rather than arbitrary habitat categories. I will then thoroughly test the performance of spatial conservation plans produced by this new method, using the new database and other independent data sources.

Conservation biology is a multidisciplinary science. Sometimes the ends of this multidisciplinary spectrum do not connect well, because it takes very different skills to code an analysis for a supercomputer and to understand how conservation practitioners influence politicians. My experience makes me uniquely placed to make the best mathematical and computational advances genuinely usable and impactful, with my collaborators, engagement with stakeholders, and with these few years of intensive work and career development.

My results can help to inform strategies for large-scale conservation, with the ultimate goal that high human population density and economic activities can be made sustainable, supported by ecosystem services, and coexisting with biodiversity. The future of life on Earth is ultimately dependent on our ability to make wise choices about land use.

New evidence-based methods in this area are needed because national and international policies require biodiversity to be preserved and degraded ecosystems to be restored, but planning hardly ever incorporates a mechanistic link between land use inputs and species distribution consequences. For example, among practitioners focussing on 'habitat networks' there is much confusion about how choose between increasing the quality of existing habitat or creating extra area, and between making patches as close as possible to each other, or filling gaps with "stepping stones". The answers to these questions ultimately depend on the dispersal and population dynamics of the species in the 'habitat networks', and the arbitrary habitat-type categories currently used may be a misleading starting point. By fixing these issues without demanding unavailable data, my methods could help all countries use to plan sustainable land-use patterns for the long-term future.

WHO WILL BENEFIT?

1. organisations responsible for DEFINING CONSERVATION POLICY (e.g. Natural England*, Natural Resources Wales, JNCC, scientific evidence and advocacy charities)
2. organisations responsible for DESIGNING AGRI-ENVIRONMENT SUBSIDY SCHEMES, CERTIFICATION SCHEMES, and similar (e.g. Defra, Natural England, Soil Association, Woodland Trust)
3. organisations responsible for LAND-USE POLICY AND REGULATION (e.g. National and local governments, National Park/AONB Authorities)
4. organisations responsible for CONSERVATION PRACTICE (e.g. Natural England, local governments, Wildlife Trusts, area ecological consultants and farm advisers);
5. farmers, foresters and other groups who MANAGE LARGE AREAS OF LAND
6. MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC, from non-academic naturalists to future generations.

* For brevity I have focussed on UK-centric example organisations. Equivalent organisations exist in most countries, and there are relevant international umbrella bodies such as IUCN, the CBD secretariat, Birdlife International, RSPO and WCS to name a few.

WHAT ARE THE POTENTIAL BENEFITS?

With the knowledge and techniques created in this fellowship it will be possible to:
~ Use remotely sensed variables to predict the viability of large communities of species in large landscapes, fully informed about how reliable the correlations are.
~ Plan how much land is needed for conservation, and where, to enable both survival of the species already present and shifting of species to new geographic ranges.
~ Quantify how robust conservation plans are to uncertainties in the ecological input data.
~ Choose the most important variables to measure when trying to plan conservation for poorly studied species and/or incompletely mapped landscapes.

If large scale conservation is better planned, based on evidence, this will have wider consequent benefits of:
~ Avoiding the gradual loss of species, even from protected areas, because of 'extinction debt'
~ Securing enough funding and other resources for conservation, by convincing people that it is needed and will be efficiently spent
~ Allowing agriculture (or industry, settlements) to be intensified in particular areas where it will cause less damage
~ Creating alternative revenue streams for farmers and other land managers based on validated contributions to conservation and ecosystem resilience
~ Improve quality of life for everyone because of improved ecosystem services
Together these constitute improvement in the effectiveness of public policy and civil society, and directly address important national policy, international treaty, and sustainable development goals