Landscape Ecological monitoring in Great Britain - the Countryside Survey 1978-2007

The present paper describes the Countryside Survey (CS) of Great Britain (GB) and provides some examples of the results. CS is the best example available of a national long term (almost 40 years) monitoring project with policy relevant results being regularly published. A unique series of datasets, consisting of a set of repeated ecological measurements of vegetation, habitats and landscape features has been collected. Other parameters such as soils and veteran trees have also been recorded as part of some surveys. CS was started in 1978 to monitor ecological change in GB (Bunce 1979) using standardised procedures for recording ecological data from representative 1 km squares throughout GB. The same sites, with some additional squares, were used for surveys of habitats in 1984 (Barr et al 1986) and both habitats and vegetation in 1990 (Barr et al 1993), 1998; (Haines-Young et al 2000) and 2007 (Norton et al 2012). There is the intention of carrying out future surveys, and trials have been carried out in Wales.
CS is based on a series of dispersed gridded, stratified, randomly selected 1 km squares derived from the Environmental Classification of Bunce et al (1996). 256 1 km sample squares were included in 1978, 506 in 1990, 569 in 1998 and 591 in 2007. Vegetation samples recorded in linear features such as roadsides and at random in the squares, all of which can be relocated. Habitats and landscape features are also mapped using a standard procedure and have been used for spatial analysis.
Two examples of the results are provided. Table 1 shows the continuous decline in species across all habitats throughout the British countryside. These changes varied between habitats, as discussed by Norton et al (2012). Table 2 presents the changes in habitats and shows the variability over time, for example over 1 % increases in Broadleaved Woodlands and decreases of up to 2 % in Arable Land. In the presented paper further examples will be given - especially of policy relevant results.