Landscape-scale conservation in practice: lessons from northern England, UK

Landscape-scale conservation projects are now Butterfly Conservation's main delivery mechanism to conserve the UK's threatened Lepidoptera. Butterfly Conservation currently works or has recently worked in 79 different landscapes targeted at key areas for threatened species, all of which involve partnerships with government agencies, other conservation organisations and landowners. Broadly we utilise two approaches firstly by providing advice to landowners and encouraging or assisting with the uptake of agri-environment or woodland grant schemes and secondly by securing external funding to directly undertake habitat management under the guidance of Butterfly Conservation project officers. These are not mutually exclusive with most projects having elements of both approaches. We describe two projects from northern England which utilise the direct funding approach and provide evidence for some of the lessons learnt by Butterfly Conservation's 10 years experience of landscape-scale conservation delivery. From County Durham we demonstrate that for the Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary Boloria selene Denis & Schiff. it is possible to restore even very small fragmented landscapes. On the North York Moors we show that a non-equilibrium declining Duke of Burgundy Hamearis lucina L. metapopulation can be stabilised by carefully targeting restoration management, demonstrating the cost benefits of early intervention.