Smarter habitat restoration in harmony with species reintroductions- testing solutions for the Chequered Skipper

Habitat loss and degradation remain major threats to species around the world, yet habitat restoration is also enjoying significant success in places. Habitat restoration can go hand-in-hand with the re-introduction of species, and both tactics may be increasingly needed under climate change. However, re-introductions are costly, and quite prone to failure, even with well-studied vertebrate species. If we could develop relatively simple and transferrable methods to assess whether habitat networks are suitable for a species, we will could greatly expand the numbers and types of species that could be considered for re-introduction. This could particularly benefit invertebrates, which are rich and influential components of ecosystems, but relatively understudied.

The Chequered Skipper is a flagship butterfly species which went extinct from England in the mid-20th century, likely due to modification of its habitat. Elsewhere in northern Europe, it persists on damp grassland habitats at woodland edges. This specific vegetation structure would not traditionally have been mapped in habitat inventories, but new techniques for remote sensing make it much easier to detect the key combinations of variables that are needed by a particular species. Furthermore, such techniques can more easily be extended to almost any species. Butterfly Conservation are performing re-introductions of Chequered Skipper in the species' last known stronghold, where habitat has recently been restored. This project aims to inform the current and future re-introductions of Chequered Skipper, improving their success by ensuring that the habitat is sufficient for populations to grow and spread over the landscape. By trialling novel and low-cost methods of predicting habitat suitability, we will also provide a model system upon which future introductions of other species can be based.

Our objectives are to:

1. Understand the key habitat factors that promote Chequered Skipper population growth and persistence. This will be achieved by combining available data from monitoring schemes in northern Europe with remotely-sensed habitat properties and some field validation.

2. Understand Chequered Skipper spatial population structure and determine the minimum area of habitat needed to support a population or several linked populations. This will be achieved by observations of movement behaviour and inference from the presence/absence of Chequered Skipper in habitat networks of different sizes. We will also investigate genetic approaches to show how neighbouring populations are functionally linked.

3. Predict whether habitat (un)suitability would limit the survival and spread of re-introduced chequered skippers in England, and test whether habitat loss explains the Chequered Skipper's extinction in England in the mid-20th century.