Environmental Stewardship and HLS - Achieving better outcomes for breeding waders

摘要

Quantity over qualityIn the last few days nearly 500 pages worth of reading has landed on my desk in the shape of two reports from Natural England and Defra: The State of the Natural Environment1 and the Environmental Stewardship Review2One aspect of particular interest to myself as a conservation manager was the accompanying press release from Natural England highlighting the desperately sad decline in breeding wader birds on lowland wet grasslands So turning to the relevant section of the State of the Natural Environment report, I thought it was significant to find that there were no less than four references to the recent paper published in Bird Study on the decline of breeding waders by Wilson and others,3 The final words of the conclusion to this seminal paper appear crucial: "There is now a pressing need for an evaluation of agri-environment in relation to breeding wader populations on lowland grassland in the UK" and "The efficacy of site designation and current agn-environment schemes for conserving breeding waders on wet gmsslands needs to be reviewed ".