Biodiversity underpins the provision of many ecosystem services essential for human well-being. However, the UK underperforms for biodiversity conservation and traditional site-based conservation is evidently insufficient to reverse species loss and secure ecosystem function. A gradient of interventions from high nature value farming to full rewilding are being proposed to address this, and these ideas are garnering increasingly support from the public, some land-owners and conservation NGOs. However, implementation is hampered by policy vacuums and a lack of understanding of the trade-offs and synergies between different land-use and land cover (LULC) options that affect biodiversity and ecosystem services (e.g. carbon sequestration and flood alleviation).
This collaborative project between Manchester Metropolitan University and Derbyshire Wildlife Trust will generate evidence to inform land-use policies across the Peak District National Park in central England. It will use geospatial data, including LULC and opportunity costs, and explore how they influence variation in biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. This will allow assessment of how the performance of the National Park has changed for nature and ecosystem services to date and forecast future changes with climate and possible land use scenarios.
The supervisory team includes Dr Alexander Lees, Dr Martin Sullivan, Dr Hannah Mossman, Dr Elias Symeonakis from Manchester Met and Mr Matt Buckler Head of Wilder Landscapes at Derbyshire Wildlife Trust.
Aims and objectives
The aim of the project is to assess the effects of different land-use policies, including wilder farming and business-as-usual scenarios, on ecosystem services and biodiversity in the Peak District National Park in order to allow effective spatial planning of actions under future climate and land uses.
Working with project partners, Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, the project will:
- Map current and past land-cover across the Peak District National Park (PDNP) to ascertain how ecosystem condition and service provision have changed, and relate these to land-use and land-use policy.
- Explore change in biodiversity value across PDNP and identify its environmental drivers, especially targeting species and habitats of international and national conservation concern.
- Develop a transferable toolkit for future land use change pathways under different climate scenarios, and apply in the PDNP to assess consequences of wilder farming/restoration/rewilding versus business-as-usual land-use scenarios (e.g. shooting, pastoral farming, forestry).
For more information visit https://www.mmu.ac.uk/research/research-study/scholarships#ai-71410-10
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