Environment and Rural Affairs Monitoring & Modelling Programme - ERAMMP Report-78: Interim Report on the Development of Indicator 44 (Status of Biological Diversity in Wales)

i. We report interim progress on work to develop a new indicator of the status of biological diversity for Wales: indicator 44 for the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015). The focus of this work is on combining data into a single indicator of change in the distribution of section 7 species over time. ii. Ongoing work has sought to quantify the additional contribution that could be made by Welsh LERC records. In doing so new tools have been developed to interrogate the LERC data and to identify extra records (combinations of date, species and 1km grid square) over and above those in existing national surveillance scheme datasets for Wales. iii. The scale and complexity of this task has been such that we cannot currently report the size of the LERC contribution. This is also in part because criteria for selecting additional data are likely to need discussion and agreement with our project partners. iv. By the end of the project we plan to have produced new updated annual trends for section 7 species that include national scheme and LERC data where possible. v. In parallel, a new and updated section 7 species indicator for Wales has been produced based on updated national scheme datasets. This combines annual estimates of change in the proportion of occupied sites in 1x1km squares in Wales for 113 species. vi. In the long-term period (1970-2016), the index of distribution change for section 7 priority species in Wales had declined to 87% of its baseline value in 1970. This is considered a statistically significant decrease and the indicator is therefore assessed as decreasing. Over this long-term period, 16% of species showed a strong or weak increase and 34% showed a strong or weak decline. vii. Over the short-term period (2011-2016), the value of the indicator increased from 85 to 87 and was assessed as stable. Between 2011 and 2016, 35% of species showed a strong or weak increase and 19% showed a strong or weak decline. viii. New results for an exper