Food webs at the landscape level: are we missing the wood for the trees?

Many conservation organisations have initiatives for protecting plants and animals which operate at the landscape scale. For example there are currently 110 Living Landscape Initiatives (Wildlife Trusts), 40 Futurescapes (RSPB), and 8 Integrated Biodiversity Delivery Areas (Natural England), plus the Nature Improvement Areas (Defra).

Food webs are very useful tool for studying communities of plants and animals and over a decade they have developed from simple descriptions of communities, to tools that can predict the results of environmental changes, such as global warming or species loss. Despite the strong move to landscape-level conservation though, food web studies are almost invariably conducted in small plots (e.g. 100 m2) in single habitats, to investigate, for example, pests and their natural enemies in a crop field, or pollinators and their nectar plants in a meadow.

Our aim here is to initiate a major change in the way we study food webs by working at the scale of the landscape (defined as a mosaic of different habitats). This proposal will allow us for the first time to understand how food webs interact in real world landscapes and how the various habitats (e.g. woodlands vs heathland vs salt marsh) affect the structure of landscape food webs, and delivery of ecosystem services such as pest control and pollination.

Our pilot data suggest that a mosaic of habitats is likely to be more resilient in to environmental damage than individual habitats. Similarly we predict better delivery of ecosystem services if a mixture of habitats are conserved. There is considerable opportunity for win : win scenarios here - better conservation of wildlife and better provision of pollination and pest control, the latter being critical for food security.

There are five objectives in our proposal:

Objective 1: Time is money in practical conservation biology, and networks which are more efficient to construct (i.e. cheaper!) are more likely to be used by conservation biologists. We will test whether food webs based on reduced sampling can still be used to identify the functionally most important species (i.e. those that support the most other species).

Objective 2: We will test whether landscapes composed of multiple habitats are more resilient to species loss than landscapes composed of fewer habitats.

Objective 3: Species that move between habitats are rarely considered in practical conservation, but could be critical for ecosystem resilience as they effectively "glue" the various habitats together. We will develop new mathematical tools to calculate how separate the various habitats are in a landscape, and conversely, how well they are glued together.

Objective 4: If nature reserves are adjacent to farmland, there is potential for the former to provide ecosystem services to the latter via mobile pollinators and parasitoids. We will test whether pollination and pest control improve in patches of strawberry plants as the number of adjacent natural habitats increases.

Objective 5: We will publish our findings in scientific journals and convey them to a wider audience, by: a) running three workshops for 90 nature reserve managers; b) working with the Bee Guardian Foundation to turn five towns in England into Bee Guardians; c) commissioning final year students to write reports for practitioners; d) running a blog; e) communicating findings to influential policy-makers.

The research team has the skills and experience to conduct research which will improve landscape conservation projects significantly. Led by Memmott, the team consists of ecologists and computer scientists, museum taxonomists and conservation ecologists. The latter all have long-term interests and influence in multiple landscape conservation projects and as can be seen from the letters of support, our project will provide the information that practitioners need for evidence-based landscape conservation.

Our research will have short- and long-term impacts impacts outside the academic community, targeted towards 1) practitioners, 2) the community and 3) policy-makers.

1) CONSERVATION PRACTITIONERS

a) Collaborators: Seven collaborating conservation practitioners became involved in the proposal when Memmott attended a meeting of the South West Wildlife Trusts in 2011. Data from the proposed research are exactly what conservation practitioners need to help them plan and implement landscape conservation projects (see letters of support).

b) Practitioner workshops: Three workshops will be run, each for 30 applied conservation practitioners, on Landscape Conservation, Conservation of Ecological Communities and Conservation of Ecosystem Services. Course schedules will be designed in consultation with practitioners, thus ensuring that we are covering the topics of most interest to them.

c) Conservation organisations and final-year undergraduate students: Conservation practitioners will commission scientific reviews written by final year students. A critical review forms part of a Bristol student's final year work (it will be supervised and assessed by academics, but sent to practitioners thereafter).

d) Project blog: The project website and blog will be open to all, but aimed at practitioners, and will explain what research we are undertaking, why we are doing it, and how we are doing it. Memmott's Urban Pollinator Project has a similar website where activities are presented via blogs and twitter: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/biology/research/ecological/community/pollinators/index2.html

2) COMMUNITY OUTREACH

a) Schools: Working with eight Bristol schools we will run events demonstrating live biocontrol agents ('meet a predator' events) and bumble bee colonies ('meet a bee' events) for ca. 700 children aged 8-11.

b) Communities: Working closely with the Bee Guardian Foundation (BGF) we will turn five towns/cities in south west England into Bee Guardians. Bee Guardians make a commitment to manage land in a bee-friendly way by avoiding pesticides, creating nesting sites, planting bee-friendly plants, learning more about bees and spreading the word. Urban habitats like the countryside consists of a mosaic of different habitats so there will be parallels between our project and urban conservation projects.

3) POLICY-MAKERS IN TWO EMERGING POLICY INITIATIVES

a) National Biodiversity Strategies: Knowledge of the network properties of multiple connected habitats will contribute to the Biodiversity 2020 strategy. Potts' existing links to Defra and Natural England will ensure the effective delivery of our outputs to Government policy-makers.

b) Landscape connectivity initiatives: There are currently 110 Living Landscape Initiatives (Wildlife Trusts), 40 Futurescapes (RSPB), and 8 Integrated Biodiversity Delivery Areas (Natural England), plus the next phase of the Nature Improvement Areas (Defra). Ongoing links, via Potts, to all these initiatives will allow summary outputs of the project to be circulated directly to the main stakeholders.

IMPACT PLAN COSTING: We request £30.8K to implement our impact plan. This impact plan is a key part of our research, as it is the main mechanism for transferring our research findings to conservation practitioners and the wider non academic community. The impact plan costs amount to very small proportion of the project overall; we want a guaranteed impact and have costed it appropriately.