Working together to add value: Enhancing landscapes for biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services

Managing landscapes for biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services is a current priority for researchers, policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders. Several initiatives exist that encourage cooperative management at the landscape level such as "Catchment sensitive farming" and the Countryside Stewardship's "Facilitation funds" that focus on biodiversity conservation as well as enhancing soil and water quality and flood mitigation. There are multiple 'clusters' of farmers, land managers, and conservation organisations, that fall under these initiatives whereby several stakeholders come together to cooperatively manage land parcels at landscape scales to deliver enhanced benefits. There also exist communities such as the "Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF)" and the "Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG)" that share information and enhance good practice amongst multiple stakeholder communities, all of which are critically important if the aspirations of the 25 year environment plan are to be met.

There are benefits to a cooperative management approach for different sectors including, farming (food production, pollination, soil), conservation NGOs (wildlife), utility companies (water quality), general public (public goods) and policy makers (effective use of public money, environmental protection and food security). There are however, inevitable trade-offs and also possible multiple solutions depending on the priorities of the stakeholders. There is therefore need for transparent, evidence-led processes to help optimise land use choices to best meet the needs of the different communities involved.

Scientific research can provide independent transparent information forming a linchpin in the sphere of available evidence. While single research projects focused on particular aspects of biodiversity and ecosystem services are important in exploring specific hypotheses, these are rarely useful in isolation. Particularly useful for policy makers, practitioner communities and advisory groups is pertinent information from multiple research projects that can be collated, consolidated and delivered in a relevant and easily accessible manner. Most research projects focus on finding the solution to pertinent issues but there is still a need to collate and translate these findings into accessible formats which is where a knowledge exchange fellowship can build capacity and add immense value. This fellowship aims to bring together information from several NERC funded projects across the University of Reading that assess landscape level interventions and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services to aid cooperative management decisions at the landscape scale.

The fellowship will create a knowledge hub comprising of stakeholders from different communities coming together to (a) gain information from existing projects, (b) inform researchers of evidence needs and (c) share real-world experience and good practices. Representatives from the policy sector, conservation NGOs, independent land advisers, land managers and owners as well as researchers will share information via this knowledge hub which will also enable transfer of knowledge to wider networks that the stakeholders are part of. Through a serious of workshops and consultations, methods and tools will be developed to enable multi-actor multiple scenario decision making to find management options that are relevant and pertinent to specific contexts. The scenarios will include both environment (future climate and land -use) as well as future policy (post-Brexit) options that the stakeholder will help formulate to best suit their needs. The outputs from research projects translated into accessible formats, as well as the decision making tools and information podcasts will be hosted on a website set up as part of the Fellowship and will be available beyond the tenure of the project.