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One approach for measuring the potential biodiversity in new urban construction projects is through ecological models that predict how wildlife will respond. For the United Kingdom, such models have only been developed for birds, but to maximise the extent to which models represent overall biodiversity, species from different indicator groups must be considered.Here, we assess this possibility for butterflies by combining citizen science survey data with high‐resolution digital maps. We derive detailed characteristics of urban landscapes around survey sites using previously established methods and quantify their relationship to counts of adults of 18 butterfly species in urban and peri‐urban settings.Higher butterfly counts were found when traversing urban sites with larger areas of semi‐natural grassland, other managed greenspaces and adjacent arable land. Most of the butterfly community were found to have negative relationships with highly built‐up or fragmented landscapes.We found high species‐specificity for different details of urban form, particularly in habitat elements such as gardens, vegetation around railways and grass verges.Policy implications. Improving biodiversity is now part of legislation governing new construction projects from England and Wales. However, predicting quantitative changes from hypothetical land‐use modifications remains challenging. Our models provide the foundation through which butterfly abundance could be integrated into an urban biodiversity assessment tool, providing species‐ and community‐level statistics to non‐specialists from the urban planning and design sector. This would allow them to hone configurations for built surfaces, private gardens, greenspaces and wildlife areas and assess their capacity to provide residents with the intended access to nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (GMEP) ran from 2013 until 2016 and was probably the most comprehensive programme of ecological study ever undertaken at a national scale in Wales. The programme aimed to (1) set up an evaluation of the environmental effects of the Glastir agri-environment scheme and (2) quantify environmental status and trends across the wider countryside of Wales. The focus was on outcomes for climate change mitigation, biodiversity, soil and water quality, woodland expansion, and cultural landscapes. As such, GMEP included a large field-survey component, collecting data on a range of elements including vegetation, land cover and use, soils, freshwaters, birds, and insect pollinators from up to three-hundred 1 km survey squares throughout Wales. The field survey capitalised upon the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) Countryside Survey of Great Britain, which has provided an extensive set of repeated, standardised ecological measurements since 1978. The design of both GMEP and the UKCEH Countryside Survey involved stratified-random sampling of squares from a 1 km grid, ensuring proportional representation from land classes with distinct climate, geology and physical geography. Data were collected from different land cover types and landscape features by trained professional surveyors, following standardised and published protocols. Thus, GMEP was designed so that surveys could be repeated at regular intervals to monitor the Welsh environment, including the impacts of agri-environment interventions. One such repeat survey is scheduled for 2021 under the Environment and Rural Affairs Monitoring & Modelling Programme (ERAMMP). Data from GMEP have been used to address many applied policy questions, but there is major potential for further analyses. The precise locations of data collection are not publicly available, largely for reasons of landowner confidentiality. However, the wide variety of available datasets can be (1) analysed at coarse spatial resolutions and (2) linked to each other based on square-level and plot-level identifiers, allowing exploration of relationships, trade-offs and synergies. This paper describes the key sets of raw data arising from the field survey at co-located sites (2013 to 2016). Data from each of these survey elements are available with the following digital object identifiers (DOIs): Landscape features (Maskell et al., 2020a–c), https://doi.org/10.5285/82c63533-529e-47b9-8e78-51b27028cc7f , https://doi.org/10.5285/9f8d9cc6-b552-4c8b-af09-e92743cdd3de , https://doi.org/10.5285/f481c6bf-5774-4df8-8776-c4d7bf059d40 ; Vegetation plots (Smart et al., 2020), https://doi.org/10.5285/71d3619c-4439-4c9e-84dc-3ca873d7f5cc ; Topsoil physico-chemical properties (Robinson et al., 2019), https://doi.org/10.5285/0fa51dc6-1537-4ad6-9d06-e476c137ed09 ; Topsoil meso-fauna (Keith et al., 2019), https://doi.org/10.5285/1c5cf317-2f03-4fef-b060-9eccbb4d9c21 ; Topsoil particle size distribution (Lebron et al., 2020), https://doi.org/10.5285/d6c3cc3c-a7b7-48b2-9e61-d07454639656 ; Headwater stream quality metrics (Scarlett et al., 2020a), https://doi.org/10.5285/e305fa80-3d38-4576-beef-f6546fad5d45 ; Pond quality metrics (Scarlett et al., 2020b), https://doi.org/10.5285/687b38d3-2278-41a0-9317-2c7595d6b882 ; Insect pollinator and flower data (Botham et al., 2020), https://doi.org/10.5285/3c8f4e46-bf6c-4ea1-9340-571fede26ee8 ; and Bird counts (Siriwardena et al., 2020), https://doi.org/10.5285/31da0a94-62be-47b3-b76e-4bdef3037360. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Bird count predictions are derived from real-world urban development plans. • Methods are readily applicable to examine how tweaks to the development plan affect predictions. • Individual species, or species groups can be assessed for the predicted impact of different land-use patterns. • No scenario provided consistent changes in bird diversity across all sites, highlighting the need for site-by-site approaches to biodiversity net-gain. If urban environments are designed from the outset to be biodiversity-friendly, they can support resilient wildlife communities, improve the wellbeing of inhabitants, and reduce overall costs due to a reduced need for buying compensatory land. Urban planners might best design productive green infrastructure through predictive tools that output rapid, quantitative, and reliable wildlife statistics from digitized plans. Here, we demonstrate how species-habitat models could provide the foundation for such a tool. We took plans for nine housing developments across England and Wales and integrated them with high-resolution digital maps to derive the urban landscape measures used to parameterise previously developed species-habitat models. We produced predictions of abundance for 55 common bird species per development, which we summarised into bird trait groups and overall diversity. We compared predictions between planned developments and designs with alterations to greenspace, woodland, and housing configuration in five scenarios. We found that biodiversity predictions for actual plans were lower than at least one scenario per development, but that the scenario that achieved the highest species diversity varied between sites. This indicates that optimal solutions for bird diversity depend upon the biophysical context of each planned development. We believe that this framework could provide a cost-effective and data-driven approach to support green infrastructure and be of particular importance for urban planners in jurisdictions where such considerations are mandatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• AES provide benefits for the farmland environment, but need to be monitored and evaluated. • Agri-environment schemes can increase benefit population growth rate of target bird species. • Welsh AES options for woodland, hedgerow and arable were particularly successful. Agri-environment schemes (AESs) have shown mixed success across Europe in terms of meeting environmental targets. Tir Gofal, the first widespread AES in Wales, ran from 1999 to 2013. Here we test the effects of its options on bird population growth rates, using the annual BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). Using over 400 1-km BBS squares, we applied a log-linear analytical approach that models the average change in expected abundance of individual species between consecutive years, testing the effects of spatio-temporal covariates (here, local quantities of Tir Gofal management and appropriate controls). Management options within the scheme were grouped according to their intended mode of impact on birds and commonalities in the habitat changes that they describe. Overall, 28/97 tests conducted produced positive results, and only four negative ones, a pattern that was also found among priority species alone (14 and two of 58 tests, respectively), involving eight of 17 priority species in Wales. Out of the ten groups of options considered, those concerning woodland, scrub and hedgerows were the most successful, each showing a predominance of positive effects across the bird species tested. Arable and grassland open-field options produced some positive effects, but failed to deliver detectable benefits for priority species, with wet grassland and waders being a particular gap. The non-significant effects found may reflect low analytical power, confounded option and landscape variation or failures of those options to address the key factors limiting species' populations. Overall, however, this study provides good evidence that Tir Gofal had positive effects on many target bird populations in Wales, showing that the scheme contributed positively to key conservation policy targets, even if significant effects were not detectable on all such species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]