Human land-use change and biodiversity trends in the British Isles

Conservation and promotion of biodiverse landscapes is a major target for ecological conservation and landscape management, as biodiversity is a key determinant of ecosystem functioning. Recent accelerations in the intensity of human land-use have been implicated for changes in biodiversity, but the relationships between land-use change and diversity are complex, include important historical legacies and major transformations are likely to have occurred across much longer time-scales than those covered by direct observation records. This collaborative research between Historic England and the Universities of Plymouth and Birmingham, is synthesising palaeoecological datasets from across the British Isles from both the natural and archaeological sciences to reconstruct biodiversity patterns and evaluate relationships between these patterns and land-use over multi-millennial time-scales. The fossil remains of plants, pollen and insects preserved in sediments are being compared and critically evaluated with the aim to provide valuable information about past land-use strategies, biodiversity, habitat resilience to disturbance and recovery rates. Exploring environmental change within the context of the Holocene (the last 11,700 years) allows comparison of ecosystem states across a wide range of land-use strategies, from hunter-gathering to complex patterns of land-use in later prehistoric and historical periods.