There is an emerging consensus that many animal species are responding to current climate warming by shifting their distributions northwards. However, in order to track climate, species must be able to disperse through landscapes that have been greatly altered by human activities, and where breeding habitats are often fragmented and scattered across inhospitable urban and agricultural landscapes. Because of this human-induced habitat loss, many species with poor dispersal ability are failing to shift their ranges and are unable to reach new sites beyond their current range margin. Predicting why some species can shift their ranges in response to climate change whilst others cannot, is crucial for improving our projections of species' future distributions. This project will address this issue by investigating species' dispersal behaviour and capability. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were greatly reduced immediately, more warming would still occur due to inertia in the Earth's climate system. Thus, there is a commitment to future warming regardless of any mitigation and, in this context, adaptation measures are required urgently. One commonly suggested adaptation measure is the creation of more permeable landscapes that enable species to movement through degraded landscapes, and help them colonise new sites. However, the effectiveness of improving habitat connectivity for promoting range shifts is essentially untested. There are currently no data examining how species' flight behaviour in response to landscape features may affect their ability to disperse over longer-distances, colonise new sites, and hence shift their ranges. Yet such information will be crucial for understanding the impacts of climate change on the distribution of biodiversity. The proposed work will provide the first investigation of how 'everyday' local flight behaviour in fragmented landscapes translates into longer-distance dispersal and colonisation success. We will focus on butterflies and collect new field data on butterfly flight path characteristics (displacement, speed of flight, directionality, etc) within breeding habitats, within non-breeding habitats, and at habitat/non-habitat patch boundaries. We will incorporate movement information and butterfly behaviour (ovipositing, nectaring, etc) into spatially-explicit dynamic models to estimate movements in 'real' study landscapes. We will test the reliability of our models by comparing modelled movements with those obtained from independent mark-recapture data for the same species and study landscapes. We will then use validated models to examine how variation in flight behaviour and availability of breeding habitat affects the probability of movement in study landscapes. Our models will also allow us to examine the effectiveness of conservation management plans to improve landscape connectivity (Impact Plan). The project will produce results of considerable practical value, as well as addressing fundamental questions about dispersal limits to species ranges. It will open up a new avenue of research on understanding and predicting the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. Conservation strategies must include adaptation strategies, but conservationists are uncertain about what to do. The proposed work will provide a concrete body of scientific evidence to inform this debate.

Biodiversity represents the life support system on which society depends, but is increasingly threatened by human activities. As a result, there is an urgent need for tested methods to help biodiversity to adapt to emerging threats such as climate change. One possible first step is to protect existing populations of threatened species by making use of the microclimates that are created by different features of the landscape, and that can buffer the effects of climate change. Conservation organisations already carry out activities that influence microclimate, for example by grazing livestock to create hot conditions for plants or invertebrates in short or broken vegetation. Such approaches are based on experience of management actions that have been successful for threatened species until now, but relatively little explicit information is available to guide these management activities under future climate change. We aim to provide practical guidance to help decide what activities should be carried out, where, and for which species, to increase the resilience of biodiversity to climate change We will use techniques developed during recent NERC-funded research, to predict variation in temperature and moisture conditions at a fine resolution throughout the landscape of South West England. We will provide our project partners, the environmental organisations that are charged with conserving biodiversity in the region, with information on how this microclimate variation influences priority species for conservation. We will work closely with these organisations to ensure that the format and content of the resources we develop are practically useful. To achieve this goal, we will liaise closely with the organisations about their conservation priorities in the region, develop a set of microclimate databases to access via Geographic Information Systems, and provide guidance and support to the partners on the application of this resource to conservation planning and management. We will apply the microclimate resources we develop to locations in South-West England in which our partners are guiding conservation management using innovative landscape-scale approaches, which require coordinated management across a range of habitats and land-uses. These landscape-scale projects will provide an opportunity to apply the microclimate information to existing questions of where and how to focus management activities to help protect species against potentially negative effects of climate change. Based on our experience of applying these techniques to conservation management in the landscape-scale projects, we will work with our partners to produce a broader guidance document to assist with planning, prioritisation and management to adapt UK biodiversity conservation to climate change. Our direct beneficiaries are bodies whose primary goal is nature conservation, but we will develop tools and guidance in a format that enables their wider future application by organisations involved with environmental policy, planning and management in the UK.

There is an emerging consensus that many animal species are responding to current climate warming by shifting their distributions northwards. However, in order to track climate, species must be able to disperse through landscapes that have been greatly altered by human activities, and where breeding habitats are often fragmented and scattered across inhospitable urban and agricultural landscapes. Because of this habitat loss, some species are failing to shift and are lagging behind climate changes because they are unable to reach new sites beyond the range margin. This failure to shift is of great concern because many species that are lagging behind climate are endangered species of high conservation concern. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were greatly reduced immediately, more warming would still occur because of inertia in the Earth's climate system. Thus there is a commitment to future warming regardless of any mitigation, and so adaptation measures are required urgently. One commonly suggested adaptation measure is the creation of new habitats as 'corridors' or 'stepping stones' to allow species to move through unsuitable landscapes, and to help them colonise new sites. However, this notion of habitat creation is essentially untested, and there is no comprehensive study of whether such adaptation methods might be successful, or how they might be implemented. The proposed work will provide the first systematic analysis of the importance of habitat availability on distribution lags in an entire group of insects (butterflies). We will develop new dynamic computer models that simulate range expansion through realistic British landscapes. The models take account of the availability of habitat and suitable climate, and also include biological processes such as dispersal, birth and death rates. We will (1) develop and validate dynamic models for all 46 resident, southerly-distributed British butterfly species. We will (2) use these models to quantify the degree to which habitat limits species' range expansion. We will (3) use models to examine the success of different habitat creation scenarios to examine which, if any, scenarios would be sufficient to allow range expansion, and which adaptation strategy is the best. The project will produce results of considerable practical value, as well as addressing fundamental questions about limits to species ranges. It will open up a new avenue of research on the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. Conservation strategies must include adaptation strategies, but conservationists are uncertain about what to do. The proposed work will provide a concrete body of scientific evidence to inform this debate.

With increasing recognition of the importance of insects, there are growing concerns that insect biodiversity has declined globally, with serious consequences for ecosystem function and services. Yet, gaps in knowledge limit progress in understanding the magnitude and direction of change. Information about insect trends is fragmented, and time-series data are restricted and unrepresentative, both taxonomically and spatially. Moreover, causal links between insect trends and anthropogenic pressures are not well-established. It is, therefore, difficult to evaluate stories about "insectageddon", to understand the ecosystem consequences, to devise mitigation strategies, or predict future trends. To address the shortfalls, we will bring together diverse sources of information, such as meta-analyses, correlative relationships and expert judgement. GLiTRS will collate these diverse lines of evidence on how insect biodiversity has changed in response to anthropogenic pressures, how responses vary according to functional traits, over space, and across biodiversity metrics (e.g. species abundance, occupancy, richness and biomass), and how insect trends drive further changes (e.g. mediated by interaction networks). We will integrate these lines of evidence into a Threat-Response model describing trends in insect biodiversity across the globe. The model will be represented in the form of a series of probabilistic statements (a Bayesian belief network) describing relationships between insect biodiversity and anthropogenic pressures. By challenging this "Threat-Response model" to predict trends for taxa and places where high-quality time series data exist, we will identify insect groups and regions for which indirect data sources are a) sufficient for predicting recent trends, b) inadequate, or c) too uncertain. Knowledge about the predictability of threat-response relationships will allow projections - with uncertainty estimates - of how insect biodiversity has changed globally, across all major taxa, functional groups and biomes. This global perspective on recent trends will provide the basis for an exploration of the consequences of insect decline for a range of ecosystem functions and services, as well as how biodiversity and ecosystem properties might be affected by plausible scenarios of future environmental change. GLiTRS is an ambitious and innovative research program: two features are particularly ground-breaking. First, the collation of multiple forms of evidence will permit a truly global perspective on insect declines that is unachievable using conventional approaches. Second, by validating "prior knowledge" (from evidence synthesis) with recent trends, we will assess the degree to which insect declines are predictable, and at what scales.

Climate change represents a challenge to conservation because the species, habitats and other benefits (e.g., soil retention, maintenance of water quality, landscape value) associated with particular nature reserves and other protected areas (e.g. SSSIs) will change. Furthermore, this may undermine the legislative basis of some protected areas that have been designated as important because they support particular species or contain large numbers of individuals of certain species. Government, conservation agencies and volunteers (often through conservation charities) - stakeholders - need to meet this challenge so as to ensure that the limited resources available for conservation are deployed most efficiently. This Knowledge Exchange programme will bring together researchers and stakeholders to identify the questions that stakeholders most require answering to develop conservation strategies that are relevant under climate change, and then to bring together appropriate scientific and other information to answer the key questions identified by the stakeholders. The focus will be on the role of protected areas within conservation strategies. The project will be achieved via networking, workshops and literature / evidence gathering work. The answers will then be disseminated widely through a jointly-produced report, journal article and accounts in stakeholder magazines and web sites; as well as by oral presentations at a launch event and at stakeholder meetings. We will also identify stakeholder requirements for further research and for further Knowledge Exchange activities. The network formed through this programme will be well-placed to drive further integration of science into policy development and conservation action. The network will include researchers at the University of York and NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Knowledge Exchange specialists, and a variety of stakeholders and policy makers from, e.g., The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Botanical Society of the British Isles, Butterfly Conservation, from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Countryside Council for Wales, Natural England and Scottish Natural Heritage, and also from Defra.