Silvopasture Biodiversity - Beetles and Bats: Methods for farmers to measure the impacts of silvopasture systems on functional biodiversity

Silvopasture describes productive livestock systems within tree dominated farm habitats. This practice benefits livestock in improved shelter and diverse browsing, with wider environmental benefits in increased carbon storage, soil health, water regulation, and biodiversity. There is still uncertainty over how the succession of open to closed woodland habitats, which follows a progression of floral and faunal community change, affects beneficial biodiversity-- and the concurrent management needs from farmers to optimise benefits.

This project will focus on the biodiversity benefits of silvopasture and associated ecosystem services, with emphasis on dung beetles and bats. Dung beetles help to break down livestock dung quickly; reducing incidence of livestock pests, and improving soil health and productivity. Bats are insectivores, valuable for pest control, and commonly used as biodiversity indicator species. The effect of succession into closed woodland habitats, under different silvopasture systems is currently unknown for both of these key groups.

Biodiversity on farms also has an economic value. However, biodiversity offsetting, marketing of produce, and outcome measurement for agri-environment schemes, will require effective measurement of biodiversity on farms. Farmers currently lack the knowledge, time, and equipment to effectively monitor functional biodiversity. Development of cost-effective methods to measure biodiversity in the context of silvopasture will enable farmers to track changes over time themselves, without reliance on outside assistance.

This project aims to monitor the functional biodiversity in silvopasture systems during establishment, develop automated methods for farmer self-monitoring during successive years, and exploit use of monitoring data for farm productivity and societal gain.

Monitoring will be carried out on a network of several silvopasture farms, practising three different tree systems. For dung beetles, camera trapping methods will be developed and optimised, producing a standardized protocol practicable by farmers, to gather images suitable for automatic identification to species. For bats, acoustic sensors will be used to identify the species and phenology of activity in the silvopasture sites. This will include feedback to farmers with web-based tools for visualising results for the species recorded.

This project will demonstrate the potential of farmers to provide useful information on functional biodiversity, while adding economic value, and allowing adaptive management towards productive and sustainable systems. Data produced will build the knowledge base, and feed into recommendations for effective and productive systems. The increased certainty will give farmers confidence and increase adoption of silvopasture. This will ultimately contribute to the UK's commitments towards net zero agriculture and halting biodiversity loss.