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Further development of the butterfly monitoring scheme in to identify and report on biodiversity trends in the UK - WC0729
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Description
• Annual updates (2008 - 2010) to population trends for individual species (focusing on Biodiversity Action Plan species), and existing UK, England and Scotland biodiversity indicators
• Development of novel biodiversity indicators to assess the impacts of climate change, and the first country-level indicators for Wales and Northern Ireland
• Interpretation of trends in populations of individual species and butterfly indices in the context of major drivers of environmental change (climate and land use)
• The launch of the first stratified random sampling scheme for insect populations in the UK, to establish a baseline for assessing the impact of broad scale environmental factors such as major land use change (effects of wide scale adoption of agri-environment schemes such as ELS) and climate change on butterfly populations
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Objective
• Develop an integrated monitoring network delivering ca750 sites monitored each year, to include:
o Application of reduced-effort sampling approaches to transect monitoring of under-recorded habitat specialists (particularly upland species)
o Development of online data capture, automated data validation and web-based reporting to greatly improve the efficiency of data management and feedback
o Development and implementation of improved methods (e.g. egg and larval counts) to monitor species not well suited to transect counts of adults (e.g. canopy species)
o An improved system to collate non-transect monitoring data at ca100 sites per annum
o Production of an overall monitoring strategy for UK butterflies, with an associated best practise survey manual covering all species/methods
• Reliable, annual UK population trends for to 57 (out of 62) resident and regular migrant butterflies, with reliable country-level trends for the majority of species
• Annual updates to existing butterfly biodiversity indicators for England, Scotland and the United Kingdom and development of indicators for Wales and Northern Ireland.
• Development of biodiversity indicators to measure the impact of climate change (life cycle changes, changes to community composition, range changes, the impact of drought) and agri-environment schemes on butterfly populations
• Implementation of a wider countryside monitoring scheme throughout the United Kingdom.
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Project Documents
• Final Report : Extending the use of butterfly recording data in the UK
(869k)
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Time-Scale and Cost
From:
2008
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To:
2011
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Cost: £499,864 |
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Contractor / Funded Organisations
Butterfly Conservation, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology |
Keywords
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Fields of Study
Wildlife Conservation |