D.B. Roy

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology | CEH · UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology Wallingford

Insect biodiversity and abundance declines have been reported widely and are expected to alter ecosystem functions and processes. Land use change has been recognised as a major cause of such declines. However, variation in local environmental drivers and the scale of available monitoring data have left large knowledge gaps in which taxa are declini...

Insects represent half of all global biodiversity, yet many of the world's insects are disappearing, with severe implications for ecosystems and agriculture. Despite this crisis, data on insect diversity and abundance remain woefully inadequate, due to the scarcity of human experts and the lack of scalable tools for monitoring. Ecologists have star...

Automated sensors have potential to standardize and expand the monitoring of insects across the globe. As one of the most scalable and fastest developing sensor technologies, we describe a framework for automated, image-based monitoring of nocturnal insects—from sensor development and field deployment to workflows for data processing and publishing...

1. Biodiversity monitoring schemes periodically measure species’ abundances and distributions at a sample of sites to understand how they have changed over time. Often, the aim is to infer change in an average sense across some wider landscape. Inference to the wider landscape is simple if the species’ abundances and distributions are similar at sa...

Climate change and habitat loss present serious threats to nature. Yet, due to a lack of historical land-use data, the potential for land-use change and baseline land-use conditions to interact with a changing climate to affect biodiversity remains largely unknown. Here, we use historical land use, climate data and species observation data to inves...

Asynchrony in population abundance can buffer the effects of environmental change leading to greater community and ecosystem stability. Both environmental (abiotic) drivers and species functional (biotic) traits can influence population dynamics leading to asynchrony. However, empirical evidence linking dissimilarity in species traits to abundance...

Annual results for 2022 from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. Report published by Butterfly Conservation, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, British Trust for Ornithology and Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

Species niches may impact population and community stability by influencing average population sizes and species richness, however, niche-based approaches are rarely applied when studying stability in natural communities. Here we utilise a niche-based approach to link niche characteristics to community stability in 140 European butterfly communitie...

EU policies, such as the EU biodiversity strategy 2030 and the Birds and Habitats Directives, demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor wildlife and other species groups are spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomically biased, and lack integration in Europe. To bridg...

ENETWILD consortium with the collaboration of the MammalNet project² has promoted some informatic tools to improve the data collection of wildlife distribution and abundance: iMammalia; MammalWeb and Agouti. Here we update the activities in relation to (i) the new languages implemented; (ii) new functionalities, (iii) and the improvement and testin...

The ambition of One Health (OH) is to focus on people, animals and the ecosystem equally (Tripartite and UNEP support OHHLEP’s definition of “One Health” (who.int)). This requires adequate data on wildlife. MAMMALNET is a European consortium set up to collect wildlife occurrence data, with the specific aim of improving our understanding and predict...

Insect declines have been reported widely and are expected to alter ecosystem functions and processes. Land-use change is recognised as a major cause of decline in insect biodiversity and abundance. Variation in local environmental drivers and the scale of available monitoring data have left large knowledge gaps in which taxa are declining and wher...

Policy makers require high-level summaries of biodiversity change. However, deriving such summaries from raw biodiversity data is a complex process involving several intermediary stages. In this paper, we describe an operational workflow for generating annual estimates of species occupancy at national scales from raw species occurrence data, which...

Aim To develop a causal understanding of the drivers of Species distribution model (SDM) performance. Location United Kingdom (UK). Methods We measured the accuracy and variance of SDMs fitted for 518 species of invertebrate and plant in the UK. Our measure of variance reflects variation among replicate model fits, and taxon experts assessed mode...

At large scales, the mechanisms underpinning stability in natural communities may vary in importance due to changes in species composition, mean abundance, and species richness. Here we link species characteristics (niche positions) and community characteristics (richness and abundance) to evaluate the importance of stability mechanisms in 156 butt...

A Summary of the Results of Plant Atlas 2020

An assessment of the state of butterflies in the UK. The report is the latest in a series that use long running monitoring and distributional data in the UK.

There is growing concern that the biodiversity crisis we face globally will cause the decline of vital ecosystem functions and services. However, due to the complexity of monitoring ‘ecosystem function’, there is little understanding of how these processes are changing alongside biodiversity and abundance loss. Here, we use a functional trait-based...

There is mounting evidence that terrestrial arthropods are declining rapidly in many areas of the world. It is unclear whether freshwater invertebrates, which are key providers of ecosystem services, are also declining. We addressed this question by analysing a long-term dataset of macroinvertebrate abundance collected from 2002 to 2019 across 5009...

Aim: To develop a causal understanding of the drivers of Species Distribution Model (SDM) performance. Location: United Kingdom (UK). Methods: We measured the accuracy and variance of SDMs fitted for 518 species of invertebrate and plant in the UK. Our measure of variance reflects variation among replicate model fits, and taxon experts assessed mo...

We use a national citizen science monitoring scheme to quantify how agricultural intensification affects honeybee diet breadth (number of plant species). To do this we used DNA metabarcoding to identify the plants present in 527 honey samples collected in 2019 across Great Britain. The species richness of forage plants was negatively correlated wit...

Policy makers require high-level summaries of biodiversity change. However, deriving such summaries from raw biodiversity data is a complex process involving several intermediary stages. In this paper, we describe an operational workflow for generating annual estimates of species occupancy at national scales from raw species occurrence data, which...

The dataset comprises one 1km habitat suitability surface for each of 5073 species of mammal, bryophyte, vascular plant, lichen, insect and non-insect invertebrate. The outputs are provided as .asc files denoting habitat suitability at a spatial resolution of 1km. The map projection is OSGB 1936 (EPSG:27700). The habitat suitability surfaces repres...

Widespread declines in insects will threaten ecosystem functioning and services. Nevertheless, a lack of data hinders assessments of population and biodiversity trends for many insect groups and thus effective conservation actions. Implementing cost‐effective, unbiased, and accurate monitoring programmes targeting different groups across a larger g...

Aim It is important to understand the factors affecting community stability because ecosystem function is increasingly at risk from biodiversity loss. Here, we evaluate how a key factor, the position of local environmental conditions within the thermal range of the species, influences the stability of butterfly communities at a continental scale....

Habitat loss is a significant driver of biodiversity loss, causing fragmentation into small, isolated patches of suitable land cover. This reduces the permeability of landscapes to the movement of individuals and reduces the likelihood of metapopulation persistence. Quantifying functional connectivity, the ability of a focal species to move between...

Climatic anomalies are increasing in intensity and frequency due to rapid rates of global change, leading to increased extinction risk for many species. The impacts of anomalies are likely to vary between species due to different degrees of sensitivity and extents of local adaptation. Here, we used long-term butterfly monitoring data of 143 species...

Final report to Defra for project number LM04108 Publicly available on Defra science report website https://randd.defra.gov.uk/ProjectDetails?ProjectId=20551

Annual results for 2021 from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. Published by Butterfly Conservation, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, British Trust for Ornithology and Joint Nature Conservation Committee

Wildlife observations submitted by volunteers through citizen science initiatives are increasingly used within research and policy. Ladybirds are popular and charismatic insects, with most species being relatively easy to identify from photographs. Therefore, they are considered an appropriate taxonomic group for engaging people through citizen sci...

The influence of large‐scale variables such as climate change on phenology has received a great deal of research attention. However, local environmental factors also play a key role in determining the timing of species life cycles. Using the meadow brown butterfly Maniola jurtina as an example, we investigate how a specific habitat type, lowland ca...

Citizen science schemes (projects) enable ecological data collection over very large spatial and temporal scales, producing datasets of high value for both pure and applied research. However, the accuracy of citizen science data is often questioned, owing to issues surrounding data quality and verification, the process by which records are checked...

Species Distribution Essential Biodiversity Variables (SD EBVs; Pereira et al. 2013, Kissling et al. 2017, Jetz et al. 2019) are defined as measurements or estimates of species’ occupancy along the axes of space, time and taxonomy. In the “ideal” case, additional stipulations have been proposed: occupancy should be characterized contiguously along...

Repurposing of brownfield sites is often promoted, because it is perceived that protecting the “green belt” limits damage to biodiversity; yet brownfield sites provide scarce habitats with limited disturbance, so conversely are also perceived to be ecologically valuable. Combining data from three national-scale UK biological monitoring schemes with...

Significance The painted lady butterfly is an annual migrant to northern regions, but the size of the immigration varies by more than 100-fold in successive years. Unlike the monarch, the painted lady breeds year round, and it has long been suspected that plant-growing conditions in winter-breeding locations drive this high annual variability. Howe...

Although a lot of plant quadrat data are collected by ecologists in Britain and Ireland, the community lacks a online repository in which to permanently store data. Such a tool would increase data sharing, improve our knowledge of vegetation and how it might be changing, and allow for future updates to national vegetation classifications.

The species data landscape in England: the way species data are collected and distributed in England and the associated costs and benefits. Recommendations for improving quality and flows of data and access to data.

Citizen science schemes enable ecological data collection over very large spatial and temporal scales, producing datasets of high value for both pure and applied research. However, the accuracy of citizen science data is often questioned, owing to issues surrounding data quality and verification, the process by which records are checked after submi...

Annual results for 2020 from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. Published by Butterfly Conservation, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, British Trust for Ornithology and Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

This annex contains the information from stakeholder consultation we used to arrive at our final scheme designs in the main paper.

This annex is simply a list of the experts that we surveyed for the costs saved portion of the paper. They have all been sent a copy of the published paper.

This is a two page infographic version of the paper itself, designed for non-acedemic readers. Please feel free to distribute widely

This annex covers the responses to the exert questionnaire (Annex 5) - note that we did not use all the information we provided in this study because not all of it was readilly quantifiable.

This annex covers the methodology used in the power analysis to determine the size of the network we used in the main paper itself.

This annex covers the overlaps between the respones that the experts (annex 4) gave to the questionnaire (annex 5 and 6) and the site networks we proposed.

This annex is the survey sent to experts (annex 4) for the "costs saved" portion of the paper. Reminder that experts only saw 3 of the 8 reserach questions each to avoid overloading them. The survey was done in word or excel depending on respondent preferences but if you want to replicate it, it can be made in Bristol Online Survey, Survey Monkey o...

This annex covers the value of pollination services at a 100% loss of pollinators as opposed to the 30% loss that we use in the main paper.

This annex covers a few additional assumptions that were made duirng the economic valuation of polination services. These were not practical to overcome at the time but we hope can be relaxed in the future should better data become available

This annex covers the full costs of monitoring across all sites and years, buidling on the cost data from Annex 3 and the ower analysis in Annex 2 as well as the information in the main methods of the paper.

This is a complete review of all the literature concerning pollinator dependence in UK crops. If you are looking to do any sort of study on these crops, please feel free to use this as a starting point/reference list. New work is badly needed on runner beans and linseed in particular. There is also information on the price data transformations and...

This annex breaks down all the cost data we used in estimating the costs of the scheme (and the costs saved from having such a scheme). They are based on our typical suppliers in the UK so if you are based elsewhere, bear in mind that the UK is likely to be more expensive than many other countries so please either flag this up if you convert the fi...

This annex covers the full mathematical proof of the consumer surplus model we used in the paper. Please note that it is different from the one used in Gallai et al., 2009.

This annex covers the full cst benefit ratios of each monitoring scheme relative to the value of pollination services and the costs of reserach saved from having the scheme.

Resilient pollination services depend on sufficient abundance of pollinating insects over time. Currently, however, most knowledge about the status and trends of pollinators is based on changes in pollinator species richness and distribution only. Systematic, long‐term monitoring of pollinators is urgently needed to provide baseline information on...

In this report, we update the European Grassland Butterfly Indicator, present new butterfly indicators for widespread species, woodland butterflies, as well as butterflies in urban environments, in Natura 2000 areas and as climate change indicators. The indicators use field data up to and including the 2018 field season. The method for calculating...

This report presents the proposal for an EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (EU-PoMS), based on the findings of an expert group of 21 people from 12 European countries. The EU-PoMS delivers of a cost-effective Core Scheme, which includes the most relevant taxa, is able to detect changes in the status of pollinators, has EU-wide coverage, and uses stan...

Around the world volunteers and non-professionals collect data as part of environmental citizen science projects, collecting wildlife observations, measures of water quality and much more. However, where projects allow flexibility in how, where, and when data are collected there will be variation in the behaviour of participants which results in bi...

The European Union's Natura 2000 (N2000) is among the largest international networks of protected areas. One of its aims is to secure the status of a predetermined set of (targeted) bird and butterfly species. However, nontarget species may also benefit from N2000. We evaluated how the terrestrial component of this network affects the abundance of...

This data resource provides plot-level plant occurrence data for the first five years (2015-2019) of the National Plant Monitoring Scheme (covering the UK, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man). Data consist of individual observations of plants, and other habitat characteristics, at the metre-scale; observations are accompanied by percentage co...

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...

Extended abstract: Recording of ladybirds by volunteers has a long history in a number of countries in Europe and other continents (Losey et al., 2007; Brown et al., 2008; Saethre et al., 2010; Gardiner et al., 2012; Grez and Zaviezo, 2015; Pocock et al., 2015; Roy and Brown, 2015; Roy et al., 2015). However, there are inherent spatial, temporal an...

Major environmental changes in the history of life on Earth have given rise to novel habitats, which gradually accumulate species. Human‐induced change is no exception, yet the rules governing species accumulation in anthropogenic habitats are not fully developed. Here we propose that nonnative plants introduced to Great Britain may function as ana...

Distributed environmental research infrastructures are important to support assessments of the effects of global change on landscapes, ecosystems and society. These infrastructures need to provide continuity to address long-term change, yet be flexible enough to respond to rapid societal and technological developments that modify research prioritie...

Here, we determine annual estimates of occupancy and species trends for 5,293 UK bryophytes, lichens, and invertebrates, providing national scale information on UK biodiversity change for 31 taxonomic groups for the time period 1970 to 2015. The dataset was produced through the application of a Bayesian occupancy modelling framework to species occu...

Advances in phenology (the annual timing of species’ life-cycles) in response to climate change are generally viewed as bioindicators of climate change, but have not been considered as predictors of range expansions. Here, we show that phenology advances combine with the number of reproductive cycles per year (voltinism) to shape abundance and dist...

The National Plant Monitoring Scheme, coordinated by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, JNCC and Plantlife, was launched in 2015 to provide an indication of the status and trends of plants and semi-natural habitats across the UK. The scheme is based on volunteer recording according to a set protocol at...

Understanding how environmental change affects ecosystem function delivery is of primary importance for fundamental and applied ecology. Current approaches focus on single environmental driver effects on communities, mediated by individual response traits. Data limitations present constraints in scaling up this approach to predict the impacts of mu...

Multi-species indicators are widely used to condense large, complex amounts of information on multiple separate species by forming a single index to inform research, policy and management. Much detail is typically lost when such indices are constructed. Here we investigate the potential of Functional Data Analysis, focussing upon Functional Princip...

The rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods has presented new opportunities for those who work with biodiversity data. Computer vision, in particular where computers can be trained to identify species in digital photographs, has significant potential to address a number of existing challenges in citizen science. The Biological Records Ce...

Grass pollen is the world’s most harmful outdoor aeroallergen. However, it is unknown how airborne pollen assemblages change across time and space. Human sensitivity varies between different species of grass that flower at different times, but it is not known whether temporal turnover in species composition match terrestrial flowering or whether sp...

Volunteer-based plant monitoring in the UK has focused mainly on distribution mapping; there has been less emphasis on the collection of data on plant communities and habitats. Abundance data provide different insights into ecological pattern and allow for more powerful inference when considering environmental change. Abundance monitoring for other...

Volunteer field trial summary report. (PDF)