Knowledge gaps and reasoning

As part of the commitment to meet global conservation targets, the UK has committed to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030. To achieve this, while also enabling adaptation to climate change and protection of our carbon stores, an improvement in the portfolio of protected sites is required, through restoration and expansion of current sites and creation of new protected areas to create a better-connected network of sites. Accounting for climate-change driven shifts in species ranges, is also crucial to developing a protected site network that enables nature protection and recovery in the future.

Systematic Conservation Planning

SCP is a tool that can account for multiple interests and requirements for conservation such as biodiversity, land use, amenity value, landscape access and ecosystem services. SCP is an evidence based approach that provides a transparent, objective and repeatable method of identifying the optimal locations for biodiversity conservation to form a representative portfolio of protected areas. SCP should be used as a decision support tool, i.e., it is to be used as a guide, not to decide on the expansion or restoration of existing protected areas. While SCP is a robust process it is also subjective; the result of SCP is dependent on the input information and therefore defining objectives and being able to incorporate alternative conservation viewpoints will be beneficial to the whole SCP process.

Biodiversity

The recent and future biodiversity layers include the modelled climate suitability envelopes for >4500 species taken from (Critchlow et al. 2022). This dataset covers 18 taxonomic groups. For each species, the probability of presence was modelled independently of probability of observation - this means that for well recorded species, the modelling process won’t have had a large impact on the result (i.e., the distribution map) compared to poorly recorded species which would be more influence by the bioclimatic variables that went into the model. The variables to model to distributions included: mean temperature of the coldest month: a measure of winter cold; growing degree days: a measure of the plant growth season; the coefficient of variation of temperature: a measure of seasonality and soil moisture: a measure of moisture availability that combines rainfall with soil capacity for water and evapotranspiration. These 4 variables describe key bioclimatic variation and are known to influence species distribution (see Critchlow et al. (2022) for more details). Modelling did not account for habitat availability.

To improve the species distribution maps, we identified their habitat association by overlaying location records (taken from GBIF and iNaturalist) with the Living England Habitat Maps. We then only included locations from the distribution maps where the habitats for each species occur. We were able to do this for approximately 25% of the species.

Carbon Storage

This is a measure of the existing above and below ground carbon storage. This was calculated as the sum of estimated below-ground carbon from the NATMAP carbon map to a depth of 100cm, and above-ground carbon stored in vegetation from Henrys, Keith, and Wood (2016).

Priority Habitats Inventory (PHI)

This is the geographic extent and location of Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act (2006) Section 41 habitats of principal importance. There are 28 unique habitats listed within the ‘main habitats’ column. Individual spatial layers indicating habitat presence were created for each of these habitats and included as individual feature layers within the SCP.

Priority Habitats Inventory - England

Climate Refugia

The dataset is a composite of three measures that in combination provide an indication of refugial potential in the landscape. These measures are altitude, solar radiation and a measure of the heterogeneity of that solar radiation. A sum of the three measures provide an overall index of refugial potential. These areas typically include areas such as those close to water, north facing slopes and areas of higher altitude (Ilya M. D. Maclean and James P. Duffy 2024).

Connectivity

This data comes from the project ‘Informing nature recovery in England by analysing “bottlenecks” in broad habitats [NECR499]’ (Gutierrez-Arellano, C., Crick, H.Q.P., Cowling, D., Drake, L., Hawkins, V. Newland, L., Taylor, S. Travers, T.J.P. & Hodgson, J.A 2024). This work used the decision support tool Condatis to generate connectivity maps of four habitats (grassland, heathland wetland and woodland) for the movement of generic species in four possible directions across England: north-south, east-west, northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast. A single connectivity layer was created that combined the four habitats.