Determining favourable conservation status for the UK's birds: creating population targets to conserve biodiversity

Background: The conservation of species in the current biodiversity and climate change crises requires the setting of population targets for species of conservation concern, in order that actions can be taken to ensure and retain healthy populations. There is no universally accepted methodology to achieve this, which is a major problem, as favourable conservation status (FCS) is a concept increasingly written into environmental legislation and is also required in global assessments, such as the IUCN's recently developed Green Status metric. Hence, there is an urgent need to evaluate whether populations are large enough to allow long-term persistence and recovery (https://www.naturepositive.org/).
Aims and Objectives: The primary objectives of this studentship are to: (1) relate species' densities to habitats and their landscape context; (2) estimate population sizes in current, future and human-free landscapes; (3) use changing and potential population size information to explore approaches to evaluate FCS; (4) use information on potential carrying capacities of habitats across the UK to identify areas for conservation management; and, (5) explore the impacts of different baseline metrics, and of future climate, on the perceived conservation status of species under different scenarios.
Methodology: We will augment already collated bird density information with national and international bird census information to produce a more detailed understanding of bird densities in different climate, habitat and land management scenarios. From this information, we will estimate population sizes for species across the UK under past and current climate conditions. Successful approaches will be applied to future and human-free scenarios, the former using species distribution modelling based on future climate and land-cover projections, and the latter using human-free landscape projections. We will use information on population estimates under different scenarios to evaluate which species are in favourable versus unfavourable conservation status. For species in unfavourable conservation status in the current and/or future landscapes, we will explore scenarios and sites of land-use change that would improve their conservation status. The initial focus will be on individual species but there is also the potential to optimise solutions to maximise benefits for many species. Finally, working with our Case partner, Natural England, we will explore how our work can inform indices of FCS in the UK as well as exploring their potential wider use in indices such as the IUCN Green Status index. Projections from species distribution models will also help formulate solutions regarding approaches to maintain species at FCS in the future.
Intellectual and Practical Significance: This project will break new academic ground in several ways. It will provide a detailed understanding of potential changing abundances of species under climate and land-use change scenarios, against a backdrop of how UK biodiversity would look in the absence of humans. It will take advantage of newly available species density datasets and recent linked projections of future climate and land use changes to provide information on objective population targets for species, whilst working closely with the UK's major government and non-governmental conservation organisations.