Co-design to improve biodiversity outcomes on common land

Research team

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Partners

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Aims

Upland common land is very important to biodiversity in England, but it is also important to the delivery of a wide number of other environmental and social outcomes in these areas. Different people desire them to deliver different, and sometimes incompatible, things.

Commoners must decide on management of their common collectively, and in some cases, also in partnership with government bodies and the land-owner. These decisions are embedded within complex wider systems of legal rights, regulation and national/international policy. There are many barriers to navigating these and developing the collaborative relationships required to effectively manage these landscapes for multiple outcomes.

Further, what could and should be achieved from an ecological perspective in upland areas, and how to achieve this, is often contested and uncertain, and requires an understanding of local biophysical conditions and their likely response to change, the wider system at a landscape level and the likely impact of global environmental changes. But the biodiversity monitoring and data used to drive decision-making in these landscapes is often incomplete.

Therefore, the aim of this PhD research project is to bring together scientific evidence, local knowledge, multiple/competing objectives and uncertainty in a collaborative process to explore different ways to manage these commons for biodiversity alongside other multifunctional outcomes.

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Approach

We are working closely with partners including commoners, local community organisations and local decision-makers. There are two phases to the work. The first is about improving our understanding of the current condition of the common and integrating farmers’ knowledge of the land with environmental data.

This has included:

• Training farmers so they can assess the ecological condition of the common themselves and store that data on an app, e.g., farmer-led habitat assessments and soil carbon sampling.
• Developing a remote sensing map to allow better monitoring of habitat cover on the common as a whole over time, ground truthed by farmer monitoring data
• Integrating farmer knowledge of the common into environmental maps, for example how the common has changed, where vegetation shifts have happened, or where livestock spend time.

The second phase is about reimagining the future of the common, using information given in the previous phase to shape scenarios and the model. This includes:

• Running workshops with farmers to develop several scenarios for the future of the common, using participatory scenario planning.
• Predicting the environmental outcomes of those future scenarios through ecological modelling using a combination of approaches that model sheep behaviour across the fell on a granular level and then predict habitat changes over time based on this.
• Apply the results of this to explore changes to other outcomes, including farmer income and carbon sequestration.

Throughout this, we’ll be exploring how this process contributes to the co-production and integration of scientific and experiential knowledge, shared system understanding and engagement of different groups. This will give us an idea of how effective this is as an approach for co-designing a sustainable (economic and ecological) future for upland landscapes with diverse stakeholders.