Tom Henry Oliver

University of Reading · School of Biological Sciences

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...

In this commentary we argue that, to transform the bioeconomy sectors towards ecologically less harmful and socially fairer outcomes, the bioeconomy policy project must be questioned, re-politicised and fundamentally reframed and reinvented. To that end, we firstly identify some of the main root causes for continuity of extractivism and injustices...

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...

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...

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...

The Bioeconomy is both an enabler and an end for the European Green Deal transformation: achieving the EGD transformation entails transforming the very meaning of sustainable bioeconomy. Among the deepest and most effective leverage points to transform a system are the worldviews driving our behaviours: they yield an enormous power to influence the...

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...

A safe and just operating space for socioecological systems is a powerful bridging concept in sustainability science. It integrates biophysical earth-system tipping points (ie, thresholds at which small changes can lead to amplifying effects) with social science considerations of distributional equity and justice. Often neglected, however, are the...

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resi...

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resi...

Bees provide a vital ecosystem service to agriculture by contributing to the pollination of many leading global crops. Human wellbeing depends not only on the quantity of agricultural yields, but also on the stability and resilience of crop production. Yet a broad understanding of how the diversity and composition of pollinator communities may infl...

López-Mañas et al. (1) raise concerns about our recent paper (2) documenting environmental drivers of annual variation in the abundance of immigrant painted ladies (Vanessa cardui) reaching southern Europe each spring. We address their concerns, and further suggest that the rationale behind their critique is predicated upon unrealistic assumptions.

There is widespread concern that species will fail to track climate change if habitat is too scarce or insufficiently connected. Targeted restoration has been advocated to help species adapt, and a "conductance" metric has been proposed, based on simulation studies, to predict effective habitat configurations. However, until now there is very littl...

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....

Pre‐dispersal seed mortality caused by premature fruit drop is a potentially important source of plant mortality, but one which has rarely been studied in the context of tropical forest plants. Of particular interest is premature fruit drop triggered by enemies, which—if density dependent—could contribute to species coexistence in tropical forest p...

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...

Food systems are primary drivers of human and environmental health, but the understanding of their diverse and dynamic co-transformation remains limited. We use a data-driven approach to disentangle different development pathways of national food systems (i.e. ‘transformation archetypes’) based on historical, intertwined trends of food system struc...

Agri-environment schemes are programmes where landholders enter into voluntary agreements (typically with governments) to manage agricultural land for environmental protection and nature conservation objectives. Previous work at local scale has shown that these features can provide additional floral and nesting resources to support wild pollinators...

Protected area (PA) networks have in the past been constructed to include all major habitats, but have often been developed through consideration of only a few indicator taxa or across restricted areas, and rarely account for global climate change. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) aims to improve the efficiency of biodiversity conservation, p...

A two page summary of the article designed for wider audiences or very busy academics. Please feel free to distribute.

• Wild bees provide a critical ecosystem service by pollinating globally important crops. Documented bee declines, notably in agricultural landscapes, therefore threaten future food security. Yet, evaluations of methods to inventory bees are rarely carried out in different crops or focus specifically upon crop pollinating species. • We utilise stan...

The need for sustainability transitions is widely recognised, along with a concurrent need for the evolution of knowledge systems to inform more effective policy action. Although there are many new policy targets relating to net zero emissions and other sustainability challenges, cities, regional and national governments are struggling to rapidly d...

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...

This is a two page infographic summary of the main paper aimed at policymakers and staff who simply don't have the time to readv the full paper. Please feel free to pass it around.

Pollinators experience large spatiotemporal fluctuations in resource availability when mass‐flowering crops are rotated with resource‐poor cereal crops. Yet, few studies have considered the effect this has on pollinator population stability, nor how this might be mitigated to maintain consistent crop pollination services. We assess the potential of...

The importance of wild bees for crop pollination is well established, but less is known about which species contribute to service delivery to inform agricultural management, monitoring and conservation. Using sites in Great Britain as a case study, we use a novel qualitative approach combining ecological information and field survey data to establi...

Functional diversity metrics based on species traits are widely used to investigate ecosystem functioning. In theory, such metrics have different implications depending on whether they are calculated from traits mediating responses to environmental change (response traits) or those regulating function (effect traits), yet trait choice in diversity...

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...

A two page summary of the paper - this is designed for a non-acedemic audience. Pleasse feel free to disseminate. There is a QR Code for the paper itself included.

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

Animals move in 'modes' where movement patterns relate to specific behaviours. Despite much work on the movement of butterflies, their behavioural modes are relatively unexplored. Here we analysed the behaviour of the model butterfly species the meadow brown, Maniola jurtina. We identified modes in both sexes and across habitats varying in resource...

1. Pollination is a key ecosystem service for global agriculture but evidence of polli-nator population declines is growing. Reliable spatial modelling of pollinator abundance is essential if we are to identify areas at risk of pollination service deficit and effectively target resources to support pollinator populations. Many models exist which pr...

Sustainable agriculture aims to produce sufficient food while minimizing environmental damage. To achieve this, we need to understand the role of agricultural landscapes in providing diverse ecosystem services and how these affect crop production and resilience, that is, maintaining yields despite environmental perturbation. We used 10 years of Eng...

Non-technical summary Resilience is a cross-disciplinary concept that is relevant for understanding the sustainability of the social and environmental conditions in which we live. Most research normatively focuses on building or strengthening resilience, despite growing recognition of the importance of breaking the resilience of, and thus transform...

Dispersal is a key process affecting population persistence and major factors affecting dispersal rates are the amounts, connectedness and properties of habitats in landscapes. We present new data on the butterfly Maniola jurtina in flower-rich and flower-poor habitats that demonstrates how movement and behaviour differ between sexes and habitat ty...

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...

Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) is a highly damaging invasive species affecting UK infrastructure and biodiversity. Under laboratory conditions, the psyllid Aphalara itadori has demonstrated its potential to be a successful biocontrol agent for F. japonica. However, this potential has not materialised in the field where long-term establishmen...

Dispersal ability is key to species persistence in times of environmental change. Assessing a species' vulnerability and response to anthropogenic changes is often performed using one of two methods: correlative approaches that infer dispersal potential based on traits, such as wingspan or an index of mobility derived from expert opinion, or a mech...

Species interactions have a spatio‐temporal component driven by environmental cues, which if altered by climate change can drive shifts in community dynamics. There is insufficient understanding of the precise time‐windows during which inter‐annual variation in weather drives phenological shifts and the consequences for mismatches between interacti...

Range shifting is vital for species persistence, but there is little consensus on why individual species vary so greatly in the rates at which their ranges have shifted in response to recent climate warming. Here, using 40 years of distribution data for 291 species from 13 invertebrate taxa in Britain, we show that interactions between habitat avai...

This Data in Brief article describes data on the movement behaviour of four species of grassland butterflies collected over three years and at four sites in southern England. The datasets consist of the movement tracks of Maniola jurtina, Aricia agestis, Pyronia tithonus, and Melanargia galathea, recorded using standard methods and presented as ste...

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...

Background: Understanding the factors influencing movement is essential to forecasting species persistence in a changing environment. Movement is often studied using mechanistic models, extrapolating short-term observations of individuals to longer-term predictions, but the role of weather variables such as air temperature and solar radiation, key...

Understanding spatial variation in the structure and stability of plant–pollinator networks, and their relationship with anthropogenic drivers, is key for maintaining pollination services and mitigating declines. Constructing sufficient networks to examine patterns over large spatial scales remains challenging. Using biological records (citizen sci...

n response to recent climate change. In the present study, we investigated range margin changes at the northern (cool) range margins of 1573 southerly-distributed species from 21 animal groups in Great Britain over the past four decades of climate change, updating previous work. Depending on data availability, range margin changes were examined ove...

Non-technical summary Our current global food system – from food production to consumption, including manufacture, packaging, transport, retail and associated businesses – is responsible for extensive negative social and environmental impacts which threaten the long-term well-being of society. This has led to increasing calls from science–policy or...

Planning for nature conservation has increasingly emphasised the concepts of resilience and spatial networks. Although the importance of habitat networks for individual species is clear, their significance for long‐term ecological resilience and multi‐species conservation strategies is less established. Referencing spatial network theory, we descri...

With growing political momentum and a keen enthusiasm to engage business and finance in environmental management, it is useful to review the merits and pitfalls of a ‘natural capital’ approach to ensure that a sensible trajectory is being pursued. Outlined in this chapter are some recommendations for a nuanced approach to the conceptualisation of ‘...

Table S1. Environmental characteristics in 1‐km radius buffers around UK butterfly monitoring scheme (UKBMS) and breeding bird survey (BBS) transects.

Table S2. Species investigated in this study, and importance of woody linear features at explaining and predicting their abundance.

Table S4. Effect of linear features variable type on abundance models for each species.

Table S3. R 2 and AIC of individual models for each species.

Fig. S1. Relationship between species abundance and woody linear features length for (a) birds and (b) butterflies.

Aim The aim was to assess the sensitivity of butterfly population dynamics to variation in weather conditions across their geographical ranges, relative to sensitivity to density dependence, and determine whether sensitivity is greater towards latitudinal range margins. Location Europe. Time period 1980–2014. Major taxa studied Butterflies. Met...

It is important for conservationists to be able to assess the risks that climate change poses to species, in order to inform decision making. Using standardised and repeatable methods, we present a national-scale assessment of the risks of range loss and opportunities for range expansion that climate change could pose for over 3000 plants and anima...

A wide variety of tools aim to support decision making by modelling, mapping and quantifying ecosystem services. If decisions are to be properly informed, the accuracy and potential limitations of these tools must be well understood. However, dedicated studies evaluating ecosystem service models against empirical data are rare, especially over larg...

Abundance data are the foundation for many ecological and conservation projects, but are only available for a few taxonomic groups. In contrast, distribution records (georeferenced presence records) are more widely available. Here we examine whether year‐to‐year changes in numbers of distribution records, collated over a large spatial scale, can pr...

Focusing on food production, in this paper we define resilience in the food security context as maintaining production of sufficient and nutritious food in the face of chronic and acute environmental perturbations . In agri‐food systems, resilience is manifest over multiple spatial scales: field, farm, regional and global. Metrics comprise producti...

Modelling species distribution and abundance is important for many conservation applications, but it is typically performed using relatively coarse‐scale environmental variables such as the area of broad land‐cover types. Fine‐scale environmental data capturing the most biologically relevant variables have the potential to improve these models. For...

1. Measuring functional connectivity, the ability of species to move between resource patches, is essential for conservation in fragmented landscapes. However, current methods are highly time consuming and expensive. 2. Population synchrony‐ the correlation in time series of counts between two long‐term population monitoring sites, has been suggest...

Climate change is increasingly altering the composition of ecological communities, in combination with other environmental pressures such as high-intensity land use. Pressures are expected to interact in their effects, but the extent to which intensive human land use constrains community responses to climate change is currently unclear. A generic i...

Environmental impact assessments are important tools for predicting the consequences of development and changes in land use. These assessments generally use a small subset of total biodiversity – typically rare and threatened species and habitats – as indicators of ecological status. However, these indicators do not necessarily reflect changes in t...

How much of something do we need to keep people safe and well? This question is frequently asked by those working in risk management. Across diverse sectors from flood protection to health care, practitioners assess risk as the product of the impact of a given event and the probability of its occurrence. Although these estimates are often uncertain...

A variety of tools have emerged with the goal of mapping the current delivery of ecosystem services and quantifying the impact of environmental changes. An important and often overlooked question is how accurate the outputs of these models are in relation to empirical observations. In this paper we validate a hydrological ecosystem service model (I...

[This retracts the article on p. e1400220 in vol. 1, PMID: 26601276.].

Drought events are projected to increase in frequency and magnitude, which may alter the composition of ecological communities. Using a functional community metric that describes abundance, life history traits and conservation status, based upon Grime's CSR (Competitive - Stress tolerant - Ruderal) scheme, we investigated how British butterfly comm...

A recent paper by Mori [1] states the need for a unification of studies of ‘engineering’ and ‘ecological’ frameworks of resilience. Engineering resilience focuses on the capacity of a system to recover to equilibrium following some kind of perturbation, while ecological resilience (ER) explicitly recognizes multiple stable states and the capacity f...