Project Timescape

A diverse range of species is important for practical reasons and for safeguarding an attractive and varied landscape for generations to come.

Biological diversity provides:

• Food for human consumption, and as part of the food chain
• New medicines
• Fuel and building materials

More fundamentally, biodiversity provides the building blocks of the natural ecosystem supporting all forms of life, such as:

• Help in decomposing waste, generating soil, pollinating crops and filtering water. (Soils are now being lost faster than they are being formed).
• Absorbtion by plants of atmospheric CO2 to produce oxygen (there is too little CO2 absorption at present)
• Adaptability in the face of rapid environmental change.
• Biodiversity helps ensure that species are available to occupy changing habitats.

In the UK there is clear evidence of a decline in populations of birds, mammals, plants and also of insect species (which account for over half of the described species on the planet)

Populations of over 71% of British butterfly species have decreased over the last 20 years, compared to declines in 56% of bird species and 28% of plant species.

Native bumblebees are threatened as flower-rich meadows have declined. Large garden bumblebees have shown a 95% decline in England since 1960.


However not all the news is negative:

Conservation efforts are being coordinated on a global and a local scale. Continued progress is essential if there is not to be a repeat of the mass extinctions of the geological past.

• A quarter of the world’s threatened birds have benefited from conservation measures
• UK rivers are now substantially less polluted.
• Otters are returning to the Thames.
• UK farms are putting more emphasis on conservation farming.
• The Red Kite has been re-introduced to Oxfordshire and is now a common sight in this area.

Find out more ... New Scientist: Mass Extinction English Nature: Species Declining