The migration of birds from temperate and arctic breeding grounds to lower latitudes for the non-breeding season is a major global wildlife event, comprising billions of birds and providing an important component of global ecosystems. Some of these movements are truly amazing - some 12 gram birds fly 3000km non-stop to reach their non-breeding grounds. The majority of inter-continental terrestrial migrations are undertaken by songbirds, which migrate across broad fronts, often stopping to refuel on their journey. Despite intensive study on the breeding grounds, and to a lesser extent the non-breeding grounds and stop-over sites, research to simulate the migratory journeys themselves, or to test theoretic models of migration for such species, is rare. A generic model of migration has never been applied to songbirds undertaking the Europe- trans-Saharan migration; this is a major objective of this proposal. In light of projections of climate and land-use changes on the breeding, non-breeding and stop-over grounds of these species, such models are urgently required. Migrants could be especially vulnerable to climate change given their reliance on the linkage between widely-separated areas, which are potentially undergoing very different changes. The main limitation to developing and testing models of songbird migration has been an inability to monitor individual movements so as to understand their routes and strategies. The recent development of geolocator trackers, which record time and location and can be used on the smaller species that comprise the majority of migrants, has provided data to test migration models for the first time. Here, we will collate tracking, and extensive ringing and observation data for trans-Saharan migrants, to better understand their migratory routes and decisions. Simultaneously, we will develop flight models for individual species, which consider species-specific physiology and form to determine their flight-range potential. We will use the outputs in spatially-explicit dynamic programming (DP) models, and will test their ability to replicate observed patterns of migration. This will build on earlier work modelling optimal migration using very simple systems. We have already developed pilot flight range models that replicate well the timing and routes of migration of tracked individuals of species with near-linear migrations. Building on these data, we will use DP models, with realistic landscape resources/costs, to evaluate optimal migratory routes and refuelling locations given temporally-constrained destination rewards (i.e., likely breeding success). We will consider landscapes with dynamic resource availability, based on factors such as species-specific habitat preferences and likely food availability (based on weather and NDVI), and will include factors such as wind direction, location (relative to time of year) and an individual's energy stores to determine whether they should stay or, if not, where they should move to. We will use these models to explore inter-annual variation in arrival dates at migratory end-points, to aid understanding of what drives phenological changes in migratory species, and to test theories of what determines migratory decisions. Modelling formalises our understanding of migration, making explicit our assumptions and any gaps in available data. Crucially, it can also inform our understanding of the migratory process and how that process will be influenced by future environmental changes. The end product will be a much better understanding of the drivers of the routes and strategies of long-distance migrants, and a modelling framework that can be applied to a wide suite of migratory passerines in different regions, or under scenarios of climate and land-use change, to simulate consequences for migratory journeys.

CBESS Summary: The health of the UK's coastlines is inextricably linked to our success as an island nation, and resonate through our economy, our recreation, and our culture. Most pressingly, of all the UK's many and varied landscapes, its coastal systems are the ones most immediately sensitive to climate change. As temperatures increase, sea levels will rise and the forces experienced where land and sea meet will become more destructive. Salt marshes, mudflats, beaches and rocky shores will all be affected but, of these areas, the most sensitive are the mudflats and salt marshes that are common features of coastal systems, and which comprise just over half of the UK's total estuarine area. Not only do these landscapes support a wide range of economically valuable animal and plant species, they also act as sites of carbon storage, nutrient recycling, and pollutant capture and destruction. Their preservation is, therefore, of the utmost importance, requiring active and informed management to save them for future generations. The Natural Environment Research Council's call to help understand the landscape-scale links between the functions that these systems provide (ecosystem service flows) and the organisms that help provide these services (biodiversity stocks) offers an important opportunity to move beyond most previous work in this field, which has been conducted at small or laboratory scales. While of foundational scientific importance, the implications of laboratory studies can be hard to translate into policy, and coastal managers require a clearer evidence base to understand how ecosystem service flows operate at much larger spatial scales, e.g. entire salt marshes or regions of intertidal flat and salt marshes. The programme we are proposing 'A hierarchical approach to the examination of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem service flows across coastal margins' (CBESS) will provide such a large scale understanding. Our consortium of UK experts ranges from microbial ecologists, through environmental economists, to mathematical modellers, including organisations like the BTO and the RSPB, who have immediate and vested interest in the sustainable use of coastal wetlands. Together, CBESS will create a study that spans the landscape scale, investigating how biodiversity stocks provide the following ecosystem services (cf. National Ecosystem Assessment). - 'Supporting' services: nutrient cycling, healthy habitat -'Provisions services; goods obtained from the landscape - 'Regulating' services: coastal protection, climate regulation (greenhouse gas exchange, carbon sequestration) - Cultural services: Recreation (walking, canoeing, angling, birding, hunting and beauty) CBESS will combine the detailed study of two regional landscapes with a broad-scale UK-wide study to allow both specific and general conclusions to be drawn. The Regional study will compare two areas of great local and national importance: Morecambe Bay on the west coast and the Greater Essex coastline on the east coast. We will carry out biological and physical surveys at more than 600 stations and use these results to clarify how biodiversity can provide these important ecosystem functions. This information will be shared with those interested in using and managing coastal systems and, after our analysis; we will propose practical methods and improved tools for the future analysis, management, and sustainability of the UK's coastal wetlands.

With the UK's water valued at £200 billion p.a., Britain's 389,000 km of river ecosystems are arguably our most important. In addition to providing water, they supply other major ecosystem services such as the regulation of flooding and water quality; support to adjacent ecosystems by supplying energy and nutrients; and large cultural value for charismatic organisms, recreation, and education. However, the ways in which organisms and ecosystem functions maintain these services in rivers are extremely poorly understood. This is despite large ongoing effects on river organisms from changing catchment land use, and increasingly also from climate change. Cost implications are large and result, for example, from impacts on recreational fisheries, water treatment costs, and high value river biodiversity. By contrast, opportunities to use management positively to increase the ecosystem service value of rivers by enhancing beneficial in-river organisms have barely been considered. In this project, we will focus on four examples of river ecosystem services chosen to be explicitly biodiversity-mediated: the regulation of water quality; the regulation of decomposition; fisheries and recreational fishing; and river birds as culturally valued biodiversity. Each is at risk from climate/land use change, illustrating their sensitivity to disturbance thresholds over different time scales. These services vary in attributable market values, and all require an integrated physical, biogeochemical, ecological and socio-economic science perspective that none of the project partners could deliver alone. Using river microbes, invertebrates, fish and river birds at levels of organisation from genes to food webs, we will test the overarching hypothesis that: "Biodiversity is central to the sustainable delivery of upland river ecosystem services under changing land-use and climate". Specifically, we will ask: 1. What is the range of services delivered by upland rivers, and which are biologically mediated? 2. What are the links between biodiversity (from genes to food webs) and service delivery? 3. How does river biodiversity affect the rate or resilience of ecosystem service delivery through time? 4. How do changes in catchment land use/ management and climate affect river biota? 5. How should river biodiversity be managed to sustain ecosystem services? At spatial scales ranging from small experimental catchments to the whole region, and at temporal scales from sub-annual to over three decades, the work will be carried out in upland Wales as a well-defined geographical area of the UK that is particularly rich in the spatially extensive and long-term data required for the project.

Urban areas cover just 2.8% of the Earth's land area, but over 50% of the human population lives in them, and these proportions are growing rapidly. Such heavy concentration of people has a wide variety of important consequences. Those for their relations with the environment have attracted much recent attention from the media, pressure groups, policy makers, researchers, and local and national government. Of particular concern have been how improvements can most effectively be made to the environmental conditions experienced in urban areas, to the levels of interaction between urban dwellers and the natural environment, and to the contribution of urban areas to the broader scale provision of ecosystem services. This raises the key issue of the form of relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services in urban areas, how the structure of urban areas (the spatial structure of the different kinds and extents of impermeable and permeable surfaces; urban form) influences these relationships, and thus how the existing structure can best be managed and how future structure can be planned to best effect. Although understanding of the levels and distributions both of biodiversity and of ecosystem services in urban areas has improved dramatically in recent years the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services have been extremely poorly studied in urban areas (and are largely absent from major collations of empirical studies). Indeed, these environments pose significant and unusual challenges: - the urban landscape is highly fragmented, with large portions sealed by buildings and paving; - greenspaces are embedded in a complex mosaic of buildings and roads that imposes major constraints and directionality on the flows of biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery across the urban landscape; - the intensity of human management of these environments can give rise to spatial patterns and scales of flows of energy, materials and biodiversity on which ecosystem services depend that would not naturally occur; and, - the very aggregations of people that give rise to urban areas typically necessitate less conventional approaches to conducting ecological research therein, involving greater engagement with the general public, and less dependence on the use of large pieces of equipment, which is "out of bounds" to the general population. In order to determine these biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships, develop deeper understanding and to test this understanding our overall approach to this project involves five main steps. We shall: - characterise the spatial ecological structure of urban areas; - determine biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships and the influence of connectivity on them; - determine the flows of biodiversity, and service delivery in selected cases; - experimentally perturb those flows to determine the impact on ecosystem service delivery; and - integrate these findings in the form of spatially explicit models which will form the basis of an "ecosystem service" layer for GIS models. This will enable us to deepen understanding, and to provide illustrations for stakeholders (such as planners, local people and NGOs) as to how "scenarios" of different development proposals might be tested, to provide support for decisions based on sound science and stakeholder engagement.

Across Europe, widespread and rapid population declines are currently being reported in many migratory bird species. For example, breeding populations of cuckoo, nightingale and spotted flycatcher in Britain have halved in the last 15 years. The causes of these declines are not understood, but the greater impact in long-distance (particularly sub-Saharan) migratory species has led to suggestions that they are being driven by changes on wintering sites. However, understanding population change in migratory species is complex because of the vast distances over which these species can travel, and the large number of locations on which they depend throughout their migratory ranges. Environmental changes in the breeding, migratory or winter locations could all be contributing to these population declines. Indeed, within the UK, we have previously shown that not all migrant populations are declining, and that both resident and migrant populations are faring better in the same areas. This suggests that changes on the breeding grounds, such as declines in habitat availability resulting from agricultural intensification, may be a primary driver of population trends (in both residents and migrants), but that changes in conditions on migration routes or winter locations may result in additional 'costs of being migrant'. As the resources and infrastructure available for conservation actions vary greatly between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, it is extremely important to identify where resources may best be spent, before embarking on costly actions that may be difficult to implement. Very little is known about the winter distribution and habitat use of the migratory bird species that travel to sub-Saharan Africa. However, these species are very well-monitored during the breeding season, thanks to volunteer-based bird surveys that are carried out across Europe to provide national estimates of the annual abundance of many species. In addition, volunteer-based constant effort bird ringing in many countries is used to monitor survival and recruitment into breeding populations. The Europe-wide scale of these data sources provides a powerful opportunity to address these issues, through within-species comparisons of (a) populations that breed across Europe but have different migratory routes, and (b) the consistency of these patterns among resident and migratory species. We therefore propose to, for the first time, integrate these large-scale, long-term data, in order to explore the extent of the population declines across Europe, identify locations and habitats where declines are most severe, and quantify the demographic and environmental factors that are driving the population declines. Quantifying the relative contribution of breeding and non-breeding season processes to these declines will be key to identifying the most appropriate locations for targeted conservation actions for these species, and will provide the framework for species-specific research in complex migratory systems.