Linking Evidence and Policy for Managing Biodiversity
in the Agricultural Landscape
Farmland is an important wildlife habitat in Europe. It supports many species including birds, plants, insects and mammals. Policymakers, advisers, conservationists and farmers are keen to farm in a way that protects this biodiversity. This one year RELU project is compiling scientific knowledge about how to protect and enhance farmland biodiversity, and presenting it in a format that is easy for policymakers and practitioners to use. The work is led by Professor William Sutherland and Dr Lynn Dicks. It will continue throughout 2011.
Engaging with policy and practice
To make evidence relevant for policy and practice, it is best to start by asking policymakers and practitioners what they want to know. We have identified over 200 people directly involved in biodiversity conservation in UK agriculture. They include conservation-oriented farmers, advisers, conservationists and national and local policymakers. We are inviting these people to be actively involved throughout the project.
Making conservation more effective through access to scientific knowledge
An important output of the project will be a free online resource that summarises evidence for the effects of different conservation interventions on European farmland. People delivering conservation on farms, whether they are land managers, conservationists, farmers, or policymakers, will be able to see the evidence compiled in plain English.
The range of possible interventions will include all specific agri-environment options related to wildlife, as well as general interventions such as increasing the proportion of semi-natural habitat in the landscape, and specific interventions such as corn bunting plots designed by conservationists or ecologists but not yet widely implemented.
The evidence synopsis, and summaries of each individual study, will be published on the Conservation Evidence website (www.conservationevidence.com). It will also be available as a book in the Conservation Evidence Synopses series.
How to set research priorities
Quantifying knowledge
Through this process, we can assess two types of knowledge amongst policymakers and practitioners.
Knowledge of possible interventions Experts will be asked about their own experience of each intervention. Have they heard of it? Have they ever implemented it? Does it work?
Knowledge of evidence Experts will be asked to score interventions according to how much scientific evidence they believe exists, on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 = no evidence, 5 = full knowledge. We will compare this with an assessment of the actual state of knowledge based on our completed synopsis.
Get involved
If you work on conservation in an agricultural context and you want to be part of this project, please contact Dr Lynn Dicks
Email: lvd22@cam.ac.uk. Telephone 01223 769018.
This is a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the RELU(Rural Environment and Land Use) initiative and is a partnership between the following organisations:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |