Organic Farming: Biodiversity Impacts Can Depend on Dispersal Characteristics and Landscape Context.

Organic farming, a low intensity system, may offer benefits for a range of taxa, but what affects the extent of those benefits is imperfectly understood. We explored the effects of organic farming and landscape on the activity density and species density of spiders and carabid beetles, using a large sample of paired organic and conventional farms in the UK. Spider activity density and species density were influenced by both farming system and surrounding landscape.

Directionality of recent bird distribution shifts and climate change in Great Britain.

There is good evidence that species' distributions are shifting poleward in response to climate change and wide interest in the magnitude of such responses for scientific and conservation purposes. It has been suggested from the directions of climatic changes that species' distribution shifts may not be simply poleward, but this has been rarely tested with observed data. Here, we apply a novel approach to measuring range shifts on axes ranging through 360°, to recent data on the distributions of 122 species of British breeding birds during 1988-1991 and 2008-2011.

Functional landscape heterogeneity and animal biodiversity in agricultural landscapes.

Biodiversity in agricultural landscapes can be increased with conversion of some production lands into 'more-natural'- unmanaged or extensively managed - lands. However, it remains unknown to what extent biodiversity can be enhanced by altering landscape pattern without reducing agricultural production. We propose a framework for this problem, considering separately compositional heterogeneity (the number and proportions of different cover types) and configurational heterogeneity (the spatial arrangement of cover types).

Assessing the impacts of agricultural intensification on biodiversity: a British perspective.

Agricultural intensification is best considered as the level of human appropriation of terrestrial net primary production. The global value is set to increase from 30%, increasing pressures on biodiversity. The pressures can be classified in terms of spatial scale, i.

Dynamics of extinction and the selection of nature reserves.

Familiar quantitative reserve-selection techniques are tailored to simple decision problems, where the representation of species is sought at minimum cost. However, conservationists have begun to ask whether representing species in reserve networks is sufficient to avoid local extinctions within selected areas. An attractive, but previously untested idea is to model current species' probabilities of occurrence as an estimate of local persistence in the near future.

Changes in bird populations on sample lowland English farms in relation to loss of hedgerows and other non-crop habitats.

Farmland bird population trends were examined on a sample of lowland English farms to assess the relative importance of habitat loss and habitat degradation. Data were extracted from 11 farms surveyed by territory mapping between 1966 and 1986 as part of the British Trust for Ornithology's Common Birds Census. The population size of 38 bird species was quantified for each farm in each year.