Guidance for interpretation of CBD categories on introduction pathways

Technical note prepared by IUCN for the European Commission. This note has been drafted by a team of experts under the supervision of IUCN within the framework of the contract No 07.0202/2016/739524/SER/ENV.D.2 “Technical and Scientific support in relation to the Implementation of Regulation 1143/2014 on Invasive Alien Species”

A review of the population and conservation status of British mammals: technical summary

A report by the Mammal Society under contract to Natural England, Natural Resources Wales and Scottish Natural Heritage. We present the first comprehensive review of the status of British mammal populations for over 20 years. The population size, range size, temporal trends and future prospects of Britain’s 58 terrestrial mammals are assessed. Island races and feral mammals are excluded from the main review, but are considered in the appendi

The state of Britain’s larger moths 2021

This report summarises current knowledge of the state of Britain’s c.900 species of larger moths, presenting analyses of long-term change based on millions of records gathered through the Rothamsted Insect Survey (RIS) and National Moth Recording Scheme (NMRS)

Lepidoptera communities across an agricultural gradient: how important are habitat area and habitat diversity in supporting high diversity?

Agricultural expansion and intensification have been linked with losses of biodiversity and disruption of key ecosystem services in farmed landscapes. A number of mitigation and adaptation strategies e.g. agri-environment schemes, have been implemented to counter these declines but their effectiveness has been questioned by conservationists as well as policy makers. A key concern is the lack of knowledge about how conservation efforts might best be directed; especially in terms of aligning the scale and type of implementation in different landscapes with the niche requirements and dynamics of different species and taxa. Here we focus on how the landscape context of farmed systems at different spatial scales determines the abundance of habitat generalist and specialist butterfly and moth species in southern England. We used butterfly data from 20 UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme sites, supplemented with moth data from a light trap survey of 11 sites, in southern England where the predominant habitat type sampled is lowland calcareous grassland. Our results show that larger areas of semi-natural grassland generally support larger numbers and a greater species richness of butterflies and moths, but that the composition of the Lepidoptera fauna changes with habitat size depending on the diversity of habitats in the landscape, particularly at the larger spatial scale. Larger areas of grassland in less diverse landscapes result in a proportionally greater number and diversity of habitat specialists, whilst habitat diversity is important in maintaining numbers and diversity of more generalist wider countryside species. Large areas of single habitat types may only be economically maintained at the expense of habitat diversity. Whilst these sites may be important in promoting abundance and diversity of selected specialist species, they may be prone to lower overall species richness. This has implications for improving the design and implementation of agri-environment schemes aimed at providing suitable habitat in order to promote the abundance and diversity of Lepidoptera and other taxa

Tools to support butterfly monitoring and analysis. Technical report

This report summarises the work within ABLE to contribute to the development of a unified system of validated and standardised butterfly counts from across European monitoring schemes. The primary aim is to provide the technical infrastructure to support the development of butterfly monitoring schemes within EU member states and regular reports on butterfly indicators and to enrich research on biodiversity. To achieve this objective, this report summarises work on the following activities: 1. Produce an effective database for butterfly monitoring records to ensure secure long-term data storage and provide with the capability to produce a suite of butterfly indicators; 2. Establish legal data-sharing agreements with existing monitoring schemes to clarify intellectual property rights and rights of access to data; 3. Gather data annually from existing monitoring schemes, standardise and validate counts, populate database; 4. Extend online data entry systems to allow new countries to submit data efficiently and in a standard format; 5. Develop and test a mobile application for capturing timed counts of butterflies across Europe, supporting a new protocol developed in this project; 6. Provide training for monitoring scheme volunteers and scheme co-ordinators in the use of the online data entry system and data analysis tools; 7. Provide tools, training and online resources for calculating national butterfly population trends; 8. Make BMS records and metadata available in a standard and validated format for research as appropriate

Visualizing Complex Process Hierarchies during the Modeling Process

Abstract. Clinical practice guidelines are documents that include recommendations describing appropriate care for the management of patients with a specific clinical condition, such as diabetes or chronic heart failure. Several representation languages exist to model these documents in a computer-interpretable and-executable form with the intention of integrating them into clinical information systems. Asbru is one of these representation languages that is able to model the complex hierarchies of these medical processes (called plans in Asbru). To allow their efficient evaluation and manipulation, they must be visualized in a compact and still clear form. This visualization must be integrated into an editing environment which makes changes to the process hierarchy easy and gives immediate feedback on the changes. In this paper, we present a novel visualization, Plan Strips, which represents the hierarchy of plans, i.e., processes, as a set of nested strips. It represents the synchronization of the plans by colour-coding the strips and by the ordering of the strips. This saves considerable space compared to graph representations. The visualization is integrated into an editing environment which allows the immediate modification of the plan hierarchy, but also changes to all other aspects of the plan

A vascular plant red list for England

The results detailed in this vascular plant Red List present for the first time the current state of England's flora measured against standardised IUCN criteria. Almost one in five species has been assessed as threatened, with many more species assessed as "Near Threatened". The destruction and transformation of semi-natural habitats across the English landscape since the publication of the first Atlas of the British Flora (Perring & Walters 1962) is well known, and these changes are mirrored not only in the long list of taxa assessed as threatened in England but also in the decline in distribution by 20% or more of a suite of "Near Threatened" species, some of which were previously assumed to be widespread and with relatively stable distributions. The strategic approach advocated by Lawton et al. (2010) to restore, create and connect extant habitats at the landscape scale is essential if the declines identified in this and other Red Lists are to be arrested. Such an approach demands long-term commitment, considerable resources and a recognition of the benefits to be gained from a more diverse and adaptable environment