Joined-up plan to help butterflies
Linking up and restoring areas of natural habitat are key to preventing threatened butterflies and moths from becoming extinct, conservationists have said.
“Landscape-scale” conservation efforts, which involve managing habits for a range of species across a large natural area, often made up of a network of sites, can successfully help rare butterflies, a report by Butterfly Conservation showed.
The charity said it has used the landscape-scale approach for more than a decade in order to more effectively manage existing habitats and link them to newly-restored areas, a move which has helped a number of species including the small blue and the marsh and pearl-bordered fritillaries.
The small blue has increased from a low of three colonies in Warwickshire to eight in just three years. The numbers of marsh fritillary in one valley in Dartmoor have increased by more than 1,000% in five years and the numbers of pearl-bordered fritillary colonies in the Wyre Forest in the West Midlands doubled in 10 years.
Many species had flourished as a result of landscape-scale conservation efforts in each of 12 landscapes examined, according to the report.
Butterflies and moths respond very rapidly to landscape-scale conservation, the charity said, and projects focused on a single species can and does benefit a whole suite of other species which have broadly the same requirement.
The research comes after Sir John Lawton’s “making space for nature” review for the Government in 2010, which called for more, bigger, better-managed and joined-up protected areas in England to help reverse continuing declines in wildlife.
Sir John said: “The Butterfly Conservation report shows what can be achieved through a highly-focused species-led approach. Very simply, ‘more, bigger, better and joined’ works and needs to rolled out far more widely. Recreating, restoring and joining up habitats benefits not just butterflies and moths but a host of other creatures with which they share their habitat.”
The report also found that short-term funding was valuable for helping restore habitats but long-term schemes such as agri-environment projects, which pay farmers to look after the land for nature, were key and effective for delivering for wildlife.
Butterfly Conservation is calling on the Government to provide more funding for landscape-scale initiatives and conservation targeted at specific species to tackle declines in wildlife. Dr Sam Ellis, Butterfly Conservation head of regions, said: “Our report shows that landscape-scale conservation works for our most threatened species. We now need to raise the funds to implement landscape projects across the UK to halt the dramatic decline of butterflies and moths.”
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