Tom Finch

RSPB · Centre for Conservation Science

Species distributions are a product of both current spatial configuration of habitats and legacies of historic land use. Therefore, effectiveness of agri-environment schemes, Payment for Ecosystem Service policies, and conservation management all hinge on understanding the relative importance of, and interactions among, current and historic drivers...

The biodiversity and climate crises demand ambitious policies lowering the environmental impacts of farming. Most current interventions incentivise so‐called land‐sharing approaches to address the widespread trade‐off between farm yields and on‐farm environmental outcomes by compensating farmers who adopt yield‐reducing interventions that encourage...

In common with many other insectivorous birds, the Common Swift Apus apus is undergoing population declines, with an estimated 57% reduction in abundance between 1995 and 2017 in the UK. The ultimate drivers of this decline are poorly understood, but links have been drawn to reductions in the abundance and availability of insect prey, as well as lo...

Many national governments have incorporated nature‐based solutions (NbS) in their plans to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions. However, uncertainties persist regarding both feasibility and consequences of major NbS deployment. Using the United Kingdom as a national‐level case study, we examined the potential contribution of three terrestrial NbS:...

Changes in the intensity and extent of farmland have a profound impact on life on Earth. Although nature-rich farmlands have conservation value, their promotion competes with the protection and restoration of natural habitat. Restoring the productive capacity of existing farmland can help maximize opportunities for the restoration of both nature-ri...

Understanding how to allocate land for the sustainable delivery of multiple, competing objectives is a major societal challenge. The land sharing‐sparing framework presents a heuristic for understanding the trade‐off between food production and biodiversity conservation by comparing region‐wide land‐use scenarios which are equivalent in terms of ov...

The land sharing‐sparing framework aims to quantify the trade‐off between food production and biodiversity conservation, but it has been criticized for offering, for reasons of simplicity, an unrealistically limited set of different land uses. Here, we develop the framework to evaluate a much larger suite of land‐use strategies in which the areas a...

Conservation science is a crisis-oriented discipline focused on reducing human impacts on nature. To explore how the field has changed over the past two decades, we analyzed 3245 applications for oral presentations submitted to the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) in Cambridge, UK. SCCS has been running every year since 2000, aims...

Determining the links between breeding populations and the pressures, threats and conditions they experience presents a challenge for the conservation of migratory birds which can use multiple sites separated by hundreds to thousands of kilometres. Furthermore, migratory connectivity – the connections made by migrating individuals between networks...

Supplementary methods Classifying farmed and spared squares In The Fens, we first identified spared blocks as all nature reserves ≥1 km 2 in size, whilst in Salisbury Plain spared blocks were identified as all contiguous areas of woodland, calcareous grassland and inland rock ≥1 km 2 in size (following Finch et al. 2019). Based on the dominant land...

Natural England commission a range of reports from external contractors to provide evidence and advice to assist us in delivering our duties. The views in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of Natural England. Background Globally, the expansion and intensification of agriculture are leading drivers of biodiv...

Conservation science is a crisis-oriented discipline focused on delivering robust answers to reducing human impacts on nature. To explore how the field might have changed during the past two decades, we analyzed 3,245 applications for oral presentations submitted to the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) in Cambridge, UK. SCCS has be...

Migratory connectivity describes the extent to which different individuals from specific breeding populations use similar non‐breeding sites, with important consequences for the demography and population structure of birds. We used mark‐recapture data from the EUring data bank to describe the non‐breeding range of Twite Linaria flavirostris within...

Empirical evidence from many regions suggests that most species would be least negatively affected if human food demand were met through high‐yield agricultural production and conservation of nonfarm ecosystems (land sparing), rather than through wildlife‐friendly farming over a larger area (land sharing). However, repeated glaciation and a long hi...

A recent paper claiming evidence of global insect declines achieved huge media attention, including claims of “insectaggedon” and a “collapse of nature.” Here, we argue that while many insects are declining in many places around the world, the study has important limitations that should be highlighted. We emphasise the robust evidence of large and...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Land sparing has been proposed as a strategy to reconcile biodiversity conservation with agricultural production, with empirical studies on five continents indicating that most species would benefit if food demand was met through high‐yield farming combined with the protection or restoration of natural habitat. Most such studies come from landscape...

How we manage farming and food systems to meet rising demand is pivotal to the future of biodiversity. Extensive field data suggest that impacts on wild populations would be greatly reduced through boosting yields on existing farmland so as to spare remaining natural habitats. High-yield farming raises other concerns because expressed per unit area...

To maximise the effectiveness of conservation interventions, it is crucial to have an understanding of how intra‐specific variation determines the relative importance of potential limiting factors. For bird populations, limiting factors include nest‐site availability and foraging resources, with the former often addressed through the provision of a...

Long-distance migratory bird populations are likely to be declining because of climate change shifting habitats or anthropogenic habitat loss [1], but this may be mediated by the size of the non-breeding area over which a population spreads (migratory spread), and migration distance (or number of stop-over sites). High migratory spread may make pop...

1. Interviews are a widely used methodology in conservation research. They are flexible, allowing in-depth analysis from a relatively small sample size and place the focus of research on the views of participants. While interviews are a popular method, several critiques have been raised in response to their use, including the lack of transparency i...

The rapid growth of online tools to communicate scientific research raises the important question of whether online attention is associated with citations in the scholarly literature. The Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) quantifies the attention received by a scientific publication on various online platforms including news, blogs and social media....

Estimating how much long‐distance migrant populations spread out and mix during the non‐breeding season (migratory connectivity) is essential for understanding and predicting population dynamics in the face of global change. We quantify variation in population spread and inter‐population mixing in long‐distance, terrestrial migrant land‐bird popula...

Despite recent advances in avian tracking technology, archival devices still present several limitations. Traditional ring recoveries provide a complementary method for studying migratory movements, particularly for cohorts of birds with a low return rate to the breeding site. Here we provide the first international analysis of ring recovery data i...

AimThe extent to which individuals from different breeding populations mix throughout the non-breeding season (i.e. migratory connectivity') has important consequences for population dynamics and conservation. Given recent declines of long-distance migrant birds, multipopulation tracking studies are crucial in order to assess the strength of migrat...

Long distance migrants are declining more rapidly than residents, with birds that breed in Europe and winter in tropical Africa providing particularly clear examples. Causal mechanisms may include climate change, but are poorly understood partly because carry-over effects from non-breeding ranges can influence breeding performance. Using long-term...