Search

Overview of the project Approximately £400 million is invested annually in agri environment schemes in England, designed to compensate farmers for loss of production (income foregone) and additional costs, to meet environmental objectives. A further £1.8 billion in subsidies is paid to comply with environmental conditions of cross compliance and greening. In December 2019, it was estimated there were ca. 50,000 agri-environment agreements covering 1.8 million hectares. Current and previous monitoring of agri-environment schemes is diverse and varied, and conducted at scales of specific management options, whole AES agreements and 1 km squares covering multiple agreements. The Monitoring and Evaluation Programme of these schemes aims to deliver evidence to achieve the following: • Evaluate the delivery of agri-environment schemes and their effectiveness in achieving their intended policy objectives; • Inform current and future agri-environment policy, scheme delivery and development; • Fulfil domestic and European reporting requirements. The existing Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (2015-2020) for Agri-environment schemes (AES) in England includes four elements: integrated monitoring, landscape scale, thematic, and evaluation and synthesis. To date, monitoring has been primarily based on tried-and-tested approaches, which provide widely recognised metrics of quality, condition and species-resolution biodiversity data, and that have counterfactuals often derived from national monitoring schemes to enable evaluation of AES. Developing technologies will need to integrate with existing tried-and-tested approaches but offer huge potential for more extensive and efficient evaluation of AES. In this project we focus on technologies with greatest potential to deliver enhanced and more cost-effective monitoring of environmental ‘outcomes’ of direct land management and interventions, in support of the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS). The technology areas covere

the ERAMMP Year 1 activities and sub-reports fall under three categories: modelling; monitoring; and data and analysis.

Biodiversity information is needed to provide a sound evidence base for decision-making, including operational needs, statutory reporting requirements and strategic needs. In this study we sought to assess aspects of coverage so as to identify gaps in taxonomic, thematic (habitat) and spatial coverage which might need to be addressed in future.

I. Better use of Local Environmental Record Centre (LERC) data in delivering biodiversity objectives is stated explicitly in the Nature Recovery Action Plan for Wales. Consistent with this aspiration we carried out two quantitative assessments of LERC data to determine the availability of species records at the resolution required for ERAMMP and WFG (Indicator 44) evidence needs; <=1km. II. A comparison of the availability of 1km square records for section 7 reptiles, amphibians and mammals between LERC and NBN Atlas showed that LERC data were more numerous in every case and sometimes markedly so (on average 17 times as many 1km square records in LERC data). For these species the NBN Atlas tends to have a greater number of records available at 10 rather than 1km square resolution. III. An assessment of the contribution of LERC 1km square records to national trends modelling demonstrated that substantial benefits in increased species coverage and precision of modelled trends are likely to arise by including additional LERC data alongside surveillance scheme data already used for trends modelling. By combining datasets the number of species that could be modelled increased by 267% on average across all the taxonomic groups previously modelled. IV. The design of the new Wales-only Indicator 44 “status of biological diversity” is currently under consultation. Our results show that species coverage for this indicator will benefit from combining multiple datasets with the current analytical state-of-the-art for trends modelling. While results are always dependent on sufficient data, there would seem to be scope for exploring how an ecologically more comprehensive Indicator 44 could be developed in partnership with Wales LERC and others. V. Our assessment also suggests that exploiting the more numerous 1km square records for section 7 species will increase the chances of detecting legacy and future effects of management scheme interventions for biodiversity and resilience