Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/K00459X/1
Food webs at the landscape level: are we missing the wood for the trees?
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Professor S Potts, University of Reading, Sch of Agriculture Policy and Dev
- Grant held at:
- University of Reading, Sch of Agriculture Policy and Dev
- Science Area:
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Global Change
- Science Topics:
- Crop protection
- Community Ecology
- Conservation Ecology
- Systematics & Taxonomy
- Ecosystem Scale Processes
- Abstract:
- 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.
- Period of Award:
- 1 Jul 2013 - 31 Dec 2016
- Value:
- £49,606 Split Award
Authorised funds only
- NERC Reference:
- NE/K00459X/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Standard Grant (FEC)
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Standard Grant
This grant award has a total value of £49,606
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Indirect - Indirect Costs | DA - Investigators | DI - Staff | DA - Estate Costs | DA - Other Directly Allocated | DI - T&S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £17,728 | £5,362 | £16,382 | £6,851 | £610 | £2,673 |
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