You may think that the wellbeing of Europe’s wildlife is under terminal threat, but a new study has found that this isn’t necessarily the case. Researchers have looked at historical data on the diversity of plants and pollinating insects in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, and found that efforts to conserve biodiversity in all three countries may be working.
The new study shows that, after plummeting for several decades, biodiversity has shown signs of improvement since 1990, which may be due to conservation efforts and wildlife-friendly farming methods. Here in the UK, bumblebees, butterflies and wild plants were all becoming less varied and diverse from the 50s to the 80s, while hoverflies and solitary bees were holding steady. Yet now wild plants have stopped their decline, bumblebees are declining more slowly (10% down from 30%), hoverflies are still stable and solitary bee diversity seems to be increasing – up 10% over the in the UK, and 7% in the Netherlands.
According to Professor Bill Kunin, an ecologist at the University of Leeds and one of the paper’s authors, ‘It’s certainly a coherent explanation of the trends we found. There’s been a huge increase in the amount of societal effort that goes into conservation, particularly in the farmed environment.’ He notes that farms taking part in agri-environment schemes do seem to be more diverse.
Professor Kunin comments, ‘Our work suggests that the resources society has spent on this have not been wasted.’ As European Union farm subsidies are renegotiated over the next few years, Professor Kunin argues that it’s important to emphasise the environmental wellness benefits that have come from the agri-environment schemes they fund, to prevent them being cut. He urges that ‘If society thinks it is wasting money by paying for these things, society will stop paying for them.’
However, for reasons that are still unclear, butterflies are still declining as quickly as ever in all three countries. Dr Luisa Carvalheiro, lead author of the paper – which appears in Ecology Letters – explains, ‘It is possible that by 1990 the most sensitive species had already gone. However, that’s probably not the whole story, as there are still plenty of rare and vulnerable species present in recent records.’
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