Improving the targeted delivery of conservation management to halt biodiversity loss

A recent global assessment shows that the rate of biodiversity loss is not slowing, making it unlikely that the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) target to achieve a significant reduction in biodiversity loss by 2010 will be met. Worryingly, biodiversity declines are continuing despite increases in the scale and intensity of policy and management responses designed to halt them. This suggests that the nature, structure and scale of these conservation measures are insufficient to counteract existing drivers of decline and are likely to be wholly inadequate in offsetting the detrimental effects of either further increases in existing pressures or the emergence of novel drivers. The key challenge now is to understand why biodiversity declines are continuing and why conservation management is not achieving its objectives. One of the principle drivers of biodiversity losses is land-use change, particularly to meet increasing human needs for food, fuel and fibre. These changes alter the quantity, quality and distribution of key resources for biodiversity, such as food and breeding sites, which determine a species' niche space in the landscape. Reductions in niche availability can have detrimental impacts on reproduction and survival rates which then drives population declines. As a consequence, most conservation policy and management strategies focus on returning these resources back into landscapes. However, one of the key gaps in the evidence-base underpinning such conservation action is an understanding of the quantity and quality of resources which are required to support stable populations. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to assess which resources are currently below the threshold levels required and therefore to effectively deliver targeted conservation management action which provides appropriate and sufficient resources to ensure population stability. This project will develop tools which can be used to identify these critical thresholds in resource availability and therefore to guide the delivery of conservation management designed to halt biodiversity loss. I will use farmland and woodland birds as model systems for this work. The UK and European governments have identified birds as proxies for wider biodiversity health and have adopted indices of population trends as headline indicators of sustainable development. Using the quantity and quality of key resources provided as a common currency, I will re-classify land-uses according to their contribution to a species' niche space and then relate niche availability to population abundance and trends. The analyses will be based on existing data collected from a number of long-term bird monitoring schemes across the UK and Europe. Assessing the links between niche availability and population dynamics across broad spatial scales and contrasting land-uses will allow the development of generic rules for predicting niche requirements across species, spatial scales and ecosystems.