Engaging schools with long-term monitoring of nature

In a new paper for the School Science Review (SSR), a themed journal for science teachers, BTO’s Director of Science describes how schools can contribute to long-term biodiversity monitoring schemes, and the benefits to schools and students of them doing so.

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Sensitivities to land use change by breeding Short-eared Owl (Asio flammeus) in Britain

Populations of Short-eared Owls are declining across many parts of their range, including here in Britain, where their breeding range contracted between 1990 and 2010. The relationships between a species’ breeding distribution and population trends with environmental variables can provide valuable information to conservation planners. By understanding these relationships it is possible to use Habitat Suitability Models to identify areas of habitat that are suitable for a species, which in turn can be useful when designating protected areas or nature reserves, or when highlighting areas where new planning developments would have an adverse effect.

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Diversity of response and effect traits provides complementary information about avian community dynamics linked to ecological function

Species vary widely in their ecological and functional traits. Ecosystems containing a wide variety of different traits usually function better and provide more ecosystem services to humans than more homogeneous ecosystems. However, the choice of traits selected to represent diversity within a community can affect our ability to understand ecosystem processes.

Designing effective survey and sampling protocols for passive acoustic monitoring as part of the national bat monitoring

The UK has one of the best developed bat monitoring programmes in the world, but despite this, six of 17 resident bat species in the UK are not currently monitored sufficiently to produce population trends. Large-scale deployment of passive acoustic methods using full spectrum bat detector technology offers a lot of potential for transforming routine monitoring of bat numbers, but it is essential that effective survey and sampling protocols are used if this potential is to be realised.

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When speed matters: The importance of flight speed in an avian collision risk model