Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
7
What makes a good farm for
biodiversity?
Introduction
This topic has focused on what makes good environmental assets for farm wildlife.
We have explored what makes a good remnant (Chapter 2), a good planting
(Chapter 3), a good paddock (Chapter 4), a good rocky outcrop (Chapter 5), and a
good waterway (Chapter 6). Individually, each of these assets has an important role
to play as habitat for wildlife and, as indicated in the previous chapters in this
topic, any improvement in any of them will be important for wildlife on farms.
These assets, however, also make an important
collective
contribution to the
overall biodiversity on a farm. This final chapter focuses on what makes a good
farm. We discuss the combined positive effects for biodiversity that can be
generated from good management of different vegetation and other conservation
assets at the farm level. We have included this chapter in the topic because
management at the farm level is often the most practical scale at which an
individual landowner can manage a property. Yet the farm scale has only rarely
received attention from biodiversity researchers who have focused either on
individual patches or at the landscape scale.
1
We show that there are some
important management activities at a farm scale that can make a significant
difference to nature conservation, sometimes with only minor changes to existing
management practices.
Of course, wildlife do not observe farm boundaries, so management practices
on a neighbouring property, like fox baiting, can have a large effect on populations
of native wildlife across multiple farms or landscapes and regions.
2
Given this, the
second part of this chapter discusses some of the findings from our work on
landscape-scale responses of biodiversity.
