The Association of Natural, Social and Economic Factors with Bird Species Richness in Rural England

Abstract

At a global level, increasing emphasis on sustainable development highlights the importance of maintaining and enhancing biodiversity. Within the European Union, agricultural reforms will have a considerable influence on the links between biodiversity, agriculture and rural communities over the next 10-20 years. An understanding of the associations between biodiversity and the rural economy is important for the development of policies to promote environmentally sustainable economic and social well-being. However, investigations of this type are frequently hindered by the different ways in which data in the natural and social sciences are collected. In this paper, we develop an innovative approach to combine data using a common spatial unit. We illustrate the application of this approach by examining associations between bird species richness, environmental and socio-economic variables. Our results show how the statistical relationship between biodiversity and environmental factors is strengthened and contextualised by prevailing socio-economic conditions. This example highlights the additional insights that can be gained from such an integrative approach, especially in terms of the questions it raises about the inter-relationships between the social, physical and ecological dynamics of rural environments. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

A Systematic Review of the Health and Well-Being Benefits of Biodiverse Environments

“…A variety of study designs (Table 1) were used to examine the central question of whether greater biodiversity is related to better health, and included 1 experimental study (Jorgensen et al 2010), 1 longitudinal comparative study (Annerstedt et al 2012), 8 un-controlled before and after or comparative studies (Barton et al 2009;Björk et al 2008;Dallimer et al 2012;de Jong et al 2012;Fuller et al 2007;Grahn & Stigsdotter 2010;Luck et al 2011;Tilt et al 2007), 4 epidemiological analyses of secondary datasets (Huby et al 2006;Huynen et al 2004;Poudyal et al 2009;Sieswerda et al 2001), and 1 cross-sectional questionnaire survey (Lemieux et al 2012), qualitative participatory study (Pereira et al 2005), and ethnography (Curtin 2009). …”

“…Several studies considered biodiversity as a variable when examining the effects of an activity (for example holidays, walking or commuting) undertaken in specific environments (Annerstedt et al 2012;Barton et al 2009;Curtin 2009;Dallimer et al 2012;Fuller et al 2007;Lemieux et al 2012;Pereira et al 2005;Tilt et al 2007). In other studies the deliberate 'use' of the environment was not considered: instead general relationships between the presence or proximity of environments of differing quality and the health of populations according to residence were investigated (de Jong et al 2012;Huby et al 2006;Huynen et al 2004;Luck et al 2011;Poudyal et al 2009;Sieswerda et al 2001). None of the publications reported dose-response relationships (i.e.…”

“…The specific environments considered included: the global populated landmass (Huynen et al 2004;Sieswerda et al 2001), a specific nation state (the USA)) (Poudyal et al 2009), geographical regions in Sweden (Annerstedt et al 2012;Björk et al 2008;de Jong et al 2012;Grahn & Stigsdotter 2010), the United Kingdom (UK) (Huby et al 2006), Australia (Luck et al 2011), and Portugal (Pereira et al 2005), and specific places including biodiverse sites of high natural heritage in the south-east of England (Barton et al 2009), selected urban green spaces in Sheffield, UK (Dallimer et al 2012;Fuller et al 2007), protected natural environments in Quebec and Ontario, Canada (Lemieux et al 2012), Andalucía, Spain (Curtin 2009), California, USA (Curtin 2009), and urban neighborhoods in Seattle, USA (Tilt et al 2007). The 2 global epidemiological studies included all countries for which relevant data were available (Huynen et al 2004;Sieswerda et al 2001).…”

“…Huynen et al (2004) also considered infant mortality rate, incidence of low weight babies and disability adjusted life expectancy. Amongst the remaining studies the objective and/or self-report outcomes included health behaviors such as physical activity (Annerstedt et al 2012;Björk et al 2008;de Jong et al 2012;Luck et al 2011;Tilt et al 2007), physiological state (Tilt et al 2007), general or specific physical health status assessed using a variety of scales or measures including the validated Short Form 36 (Björk et al 2008;de Jong et al 2012;Grahn & Stigsdotter 2010;Lemieux et al 2012), general psychological or emotional health, wellbeing or status assessed using a variety of measures or scales including the General Health Questionnaire 12, Profile of Mood States scale and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Annerstedt et al 2012;Barton et al 2009;Björk et al 2008;Dallimer et al 2012;Fuller et al 2007;Huby et al 2006;Jorgensen et al 2010;Lemieux et al 2012;Luck et al 2011), and community level wellbeing (de Jong et al 2012;Luck et al 2011;Pereira et al 2005) .…”

The House Crow (Corvus splendens): A Threat to New Zealand?

“…These conditions or predictors are normally environmental variables, abiotic factors and even socio-economic conditions that are important for the species [40][41][42]. ENM and SDM are being used in a wide variety of domains such as threatened species mapping [43][44][45][46], disease vector mapping such as mosquitoes carrying dengue and malaria [47] and invasive species potential distribution [48,49].…”