Securing Biodiversity in Breckland - European Commission

The Breckland Biodiversity Audit has set out to address many of these needs and to provide anunderstanding of the priority species in Breckland, their requirements, and strategic approaches tomanagement for their conservation.Aims of the auditThe Breckland Biodiversity Audit was commissioned and guided by a wide partnership oforganisations that included the Biodiversity Partnerships of Norfolk and Suffolk, the BrecksPartnership, the Forestry Commission, Natural England and Plantlife. It seeks to provide a robustevidence base to guide actions to secure Breckland’s biodiversity for the future.The aims of the Breckland Biodiversity Audit may be summarised as three key elements:What, Where and How.1) What is the biodiversity in Breckland?The audit: Collated and examined available evidence to understand what species are present inBreckland. Objectively defined the suite of Breckland conservation priority species. Where possible, assessed the recent or current status of priority species, although theevidence base for this was expected to be highly incomplete.2) Where is this biodiversity?In order to support strategic biodiversity delivery at a landscape scale, we undertook to: Map the density of BAP species across the region Map the density of range restricted regional specialists Map assemblages requiring particular ecological conditions and processes, in order toidentify hotspots and spatial priorities for different groups Assess the quality of evidence and gaps in the knowledge base, for both speciesdistributions and status, and provide recommendations for further survey requirements.3) What does the priority biodiversity require? (How can it be conserved?)A key objective of the Breckland Biodiversity Audit was to provide land managers and conservationadvisers with guidance as to how to enhance and sustain the important biodiversity. Effectivemanagement is best achieved by providing prescriptions based on sound evidence rather than onmyth, hearsay, received wisdom or dogma. The novel approach taken here was to identify multispeciesassemblages and associated flagship invertebrate and plant species, requiring similarecological processes and conditions (here-after referred to as ‘assemblages’ or ‘guilds’). This has theaim of integrating prescriptions for multiple species into habitat-based approaches, but through anevidence-based approach rooted in an understanding of the ecological requirements of individualspecies.25