The interplay of land-use, climate and plant biodiversity on the UK stage

Landscapes are composed of different habitats as well as the biodiversity that resides within them, and are a product of interactions between climate, geography and human use. They provide many ecosystem services, such as provision of food and water, regulation of climate and carbon cycling, which are vital for a stable future for our society, economy, health and wellbeing.

It is now widely recognised that we are degrading the health of our landscapes through unsustainable use and long-term climate change, although it remains difficult to track these changes. In particular, plants form the basis of all terrestrial ecosystems, are fundamental to providing ecosystem services, absorb 20% of fossil fuel emissions; yet records on a third of plant species are so data deficient that formal assessments of extinction risk cannot be made. A key goal of the Aichi biodiversity targets set out by the Convention on Biological Diversity, sought to ensure the conservation of biodiversity through sustainable use of agriculture, forestry and fisheries and for which the UK is progressing at an insufficient rate to meet the 2020 deadline. Therefore, tools by which we assess current trends in plant biodiversity and explore the interaction with both environmental and land use are fundamental for ensuring the future of UK's plant systems. Current models of biodiversity use very coarse groupings of plants that lack the necessary level of detail to inform conservation planning and decision making.

Here, we propose to extend a modelling framework that we have been developing over several years at a global scale to focus exclusively on plants of the UK, of which there are over 1,800 species, in order to take advantage of the higher resolution and qualitatively more detailed records available for climate, land use and plant species. These simulations will predict potential change in plant biodiversity patterns over time based on different land use and climate change scenarios, which can then be used to understand the impact of these changes and ultimately guide future landscape decision making.

The development of the first species-level plant biodiversity simulator for the UK will provide an urgently needed tool for assessing the biodiversity impact of landscape decisions. As such, it will be of particular importance to conservationists and policy makers, such as the Scottish Government and its bodies (e.g. Scottish Natural Heritage). Critically, the simulator will allow the user to compare and contrast different land-use change decisions and use them to evaluate their respective impacts on regional biodiversity. We will also be able to assess the ability of plant species to adapt to different climate change scenarios in the presence and absence of mitigating land use policy. In this way, the simulator draws together the two major strands of human-influenced environmental change, climate change and land-use decisions, and seeks to improve our understanding of the impact of these factors on the natural environment.

The broad implications of this research in terms of our understanding of the effect of policy decisions means that the results of this work will also be significant interest to the general public. Outreach activities through the Natural History Museum will promote engagement with people of all ages and backgrounds, and seek to inspire them to engage further with the impact of government decisions.