Both intensity and type of habitat management in grasslands and heathlands affect spider communities. With high intensity management, spider communities often lack diversity and are dominated by a few r-selected species af®liated with bare ground. Low intensity management produces more complex communities introducing more niches for aerial web spinners and climbing spiders. The preferred management will be site-dependent and may not be appropriate for all spiders in all situations, particularly for some rare or threatened species. Providing natural cover is recommended when using extreme forms of management or intensive grazing (particularly by sheep). In extreme cases, or where trampling is heavy, the litter layer should be conserved. We advocate research and survey before and after major management implementation. Habitat management for spiders should not be considered alone, but integrated into a holistic plan. Management for spiders may con¯ict with rare plant conservation and small reserves should examine the viability of providing two contrasting regimes.
Common approaches to mapping green infrastructure in urbanised landscapes invariably focus on measures of land use or land cover and associated functional or physical traits. However, such onedimensional perspectives do not accurately capture the character and complexity of the landscapes in which urban inhabitants live. The new approach presented in this paper demonstrates how open-source, high spatial and temporal resolution data with global coverage can be used to measure and represent the landscape qualities of urban environments. Through going beyond simple metrics of quantity, such as percentage green and blue cover, it is now possible to explore the extent to which landscape quality helps to unpick the mixed evidence presented in the literature on the benefits of urban nature to human well-being. Here we present a landscape approach, employing remote sensing, GIS and data reduction techniques to map urban green infrastructure elements in a large U.K. city region. Comparison with existing urban datasets demonstrates considerable improvement in terms of coverage and thematic detail. The characterisation of landscapes, using census tracts as spatial units, and subsequent exploration of associations with social-ecological attributes highlights the further detail that can be uncovered by the approach. For example, eight urban landscape types identified for the case study city exhibited associations with distinct socioeconomic conditions accountable not only to quantities but also qualities of green and blue space. The identification of individual landscape features through simultaneous measures of land use and land cover demonstrated unique and significant associations between the former and indicators of human health and ecological condition. The approach may therefore provide a promising basis for developing further insight into processes and characteristics that affect human health and well-being in urban areas, both in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Background: Patient choice and access to health care is compromised by many barriers including travel distance. Individuals with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can seek free specialist care in Britain, without a referral, providing flexible access to care services. Willingness to travel beyond local services for preferred care has funding and service implications. Data from an enhanced HIV surveillance system were used to explore geodemographic and clinical factors associated with accessing treatment services.
Abandoned limestone quarries are hostile environments for plant and invertebrate colonization and establishment. The length of time taken for successful establishment by natural processes may be unacceptable for reclamation purposes; several techniques are used to reduce the time scales involved. A new technique, restoration blasting, aims to replicate natural daleside landforms by selective blasting of modern production quarry faces. We compare the flora and invertebrate fauna of restoration‐blasted sites, hydro‐seeded with daleside species, with naturally regenerating disused quarries and a natural daleside. Restoration‐blasted sites were found to have less plant cover, more bare ground, fewer orders of invertebrates, and generally fewer animals within each order than the other two types of site. The disused quarries tended to have intermediate characteristics between the restoration‐blasted sites and the natural daleside. The age of the site may be important in determining the plants and invertebrates occurring there. This may be related to the time available for establishment or a greater degree of settlement or stability within the biotic and abiotic components of the site. Although most of the results indicate that time since establishment may be important, some variations occur. In particular, the development of vegetation cover in areas grazed by rabbits is problematic. These results are important in the assessment of successful reclamation because the invertebrate fauna may contribute greatly to the overall system. Both plant and animal communities appear to be establishing well on the sites reclaimed by restoration blasting. Further monitoring will identify the speed at which such environments achieve the desired aim of replicating daleside communities and the communities best able to be sustained following this technique.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.