Showcasing more exciting and innovative work from students and early career professionals! We will highlight the exciting and innovative work being carried out by students and early‑career professionals whose research and practice are helping to shape the future of landscape ecology.
Join us to discover fresh perspectives, explore new ideas, and support the next generation of landscape ecologists.
Register here now!
We’ll be hearing from:
Emily Cole, University of Southampton: The local government challenges of compatible land-based targets for biodiversity and climate change
This research investigated the challenges of implementing land-based targets for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation through semi-structured interviews with local government policymakers in Hampshire, England. Implementation of these goals is frequently fragmented. Structural asymmetries in governance mean statutory biodiversity requirements are prioritised, with local government lacking the necessary legal powers for climate change mitigation. Repeated cuts to funding and limited land ownership often restrict local governments to an influencer role over private landowners. Collaboration across local governments emerged as a key coping strategy, yet reliance on informal networks risks reinforcing existing inequalities and does not overcome the absence of clear national spatial guidance. Understanding these local constraints and the compatibility of various land-based environmental targets is essential for designing national strategies that effectively translate into coherent actions at the local level.
Russel Stevens, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology: Improving biodiversity on Welsh cycle routes - a case study in quantifying BNG uplift
Most developments in England are now expected to deliver a 10% increase in Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) and Wales has adopted a similar approach called Net Benefit for Biodiversity. Quantifying BNG potential can therefore be an informative metric for land managers, both as a possible trading asset and as a measure of their own environmental improvement goals. An objective of the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust is to map existing habitats along the National Cycle Network (NCN) and understand what management improvements can be made. Using remote sensing data products, we mapped habitat management opportunities and quantified potential increases in BNG. This provided a useful comparison across the NCN, informing the charity of where best to focus resources to maximise habitat improvement, helping to achieve their Biodiversity Action Plan goals. This approach could be adopted more widely to quantify habitat management changes for other organisations across different landscapes.
Thomas O’Callaghan-Brown, University of Oxford: Urban Ecological Landscapes: how landscape ecology can provide a more detailed conception of nature in cities
In cities, nature sits at the nexus of the wild and the domestic. Efforts to understand it in these settings often neglect how it operates within and across urban landscapes. While most policy and strategies focus on structural components like canopy and greenspace cover, it is also possible to adopt a functional approach. Such an approach highlights the risks of limiting ecosystem assessments to administrative boundaries and highlights the interconnected, complex way in which nature works. In my research I have employed landscape connectivity models, using Omniscape, to assess how specialists and generalists of woodland and grassland ecosystems interact and move through the landscape. In comparing this with the structural assessments used in policy literature it became clear that these risk siloing nature and relegating recovery efforts to the local scale. Through conceiving of our cities as an ecological landscape it is possible to provide a more thorough assessment of the way organisms interact with ecosystems, as well as the services these ecosystems provide.
Gui Castro, Kew Royal Botanic Gardens: Southeast UK landscapes are getting greener - good or bad news?
Anthropogenic global changes are threatening ecosystems’ functions and patterns. Yet, our understanding of how global and local drivers interact and impact ecosystems at the landscape scale remains limited. In particular, there is a lack of long-term evidence exploring landscape pattern-process relationships to inform land management and restoration efforts. This study evaluates spatio-temporal changes in vegetation dynamics using satellite imagery across a 30-year period (1995–2024) in Sussex (UK) landscapes. The results reveal an overall spatially-heterogeneous increase in vegetation greenness (NDVI), with increasing temperatures and land cover changes being key drivers of change.
Register for the September event here.
This event follows on from a similar edition of our Landscape Connections series. If you missed that previous session, catch up here.