Description
Many post-industrial sites and their ‘novel ecosystems’ can be vitally important places for biodiversity, offering refugia for an array of rare and threatened wildlife, particularly invertebrates. Whilst it may be challenging to return a post-industrial ecosystem to a local historical baseline, targeted management of these sites offer opportunities to protect rare native species, reduce habitat fragmentation and enhance regional biodiversity. Post-industrial landscapes, such as reclaimed opencast mines and restored landfill sites, could also provide important semi-natural habitat for pollinators. Emerging biodiversity offsetting schemes, such as Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), could provide financial and legal mechanisms to help protect and restore biodiversity on post-industrial land.
However, as a habitat-driven approach, there are concerns that BNG could neglect important components of ecosystems, particularly invertebrates, and will not be effectively monitored or enforced. It is unclear both how the Statutory Metric accounts for the early successional and complex features of post-industrial landscapes, and how well it acts as a proxy for pollinator diversity. Rosie’s PhD aims to address these knowledge gaps by testing whether Statutory BNG Metric scores correlate with pollinator abundance and functional diversity on post-industrial grasslands in the North East of England.
Rosie is in the fourth year of her PhD at Newcastle University, researching how the restoration of post-industrial land can contribute to Biodiversity Net Gain in England. Rosie uses traditional and novel methods, including the use of acoustic monitors, to assess rates of soil recovery on the first rewilding site on a former mine in Britain. Rosie is also researching how well the BNG metric acts as a proxy for biodiversity on post-industrial landscapes by conducting pollinator surveys across various post-industrial grasslands in the North East of England.
