The value of landscape scale conservation for a butterfly that is failing to track climate change

Biodiversity is threatened by land-use change and climate change, and species distribution models have powerfully highlighted some species that are failing to keep up with climate change. One potential solution is to restore habitat networks to be "bigger, better and more connected", but there is a danger that generic measures for landscape-scale conservation will only help the species that are already widespread and able to colonise new landscapes easily. We urgently need to find out whether achievable amounts of habitat restoration could facilitate climate tracking for the species that are seemingly stalled. The grizzled skipper butterfly, Pyrgus malvae, like many species, occurs on several different broad habitat types but has particular requirements for host plants and microclimate, which means small differences in management can lead to enormous differences in habitat quality. Climate envelope models predict that it should be expanding northwards with recent climate change, yet monitored populations have declined.

This project will test competing explanations for why the grizzled skipper has not expanded its range in Britain, and assess how large-scale habitat restoration at its northern range margin might help. Extensive fieldwork, spatial statistics and population modelling will be combined to achieve the following objectives:
• To quantify the habitat quality of brownfield sites, grasslands and woodland clearings for grizzled skipper and relate these to more fundamental variables of host plant abundance and microclimate.
• To explore, using dynamic distribution models, the importance of habitat availability in predicting grizzled skipper distributions, and compare the results to more classical climate envelope models that ignore habitat availability.
• To test by simulation how different future land-use strategies might affect the tracking of climate change by grizzled skipper populations, and predict how much restored habitat would be sufficient.

This project is led by Jenny Hodgson at the University of Liverpool, and will be in collaboration with Marc Botham and Nick Isaac at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), and Tom Brereton, head of monitoring at the charity Butterfly Conservation. The CEH Biological Records Centre holds world-leading biodiversity and land-use databases, and Butterfly Conservation co-ordinate nationwide monitoring and conservation efforts for P. malvae and other species of concern. We have extensive experience in quantifying species’ responses to global change (for examples see references below), and will provide training in cutting-edge methods.

The email form below can be used for both enquiries and full applications - the form will be received by the Institute of Integrative Biology and forwarded to Dr Hodgson. In addition to the essential qualifications, desirable attributes for this particular project include: experience with population or community ecology fieldwork, especially mark-release-recapture; experience in GIS; experience with species distribution models and/or GLMs; experience of independent project planning and management. When applying, please explain your funding situation, see below.