Incorporating trophic interactions into the optimisation of cost-effective agri-environmental schemes for biodiversity conservation in grassland

TrophCost will proceed as follows. We will first identify sets of plant and insect species (butterflies and granivorous/omnivorous ground beetles) with strong co-occurrence patterns and known trophic links. We will create co-occurrence and trophic linkage matrices between plant and insect species and then systematically compare associations between species pairs in these matrices. The identified species that show strong co-occurrence and trophic linkage patterns are candidates that will be incorporated into the ecological-economic modelling procedure. In order to understand how grassland management measures, modify co-occurrence patterns between plant resources and insect consumers across environmental conditions, we will identify plant resource – insect consumer links in communities of butterflies and granivorous/omnivorous ground beetles from available community data for all 150 grassland plots in the three Biodiversity Exploratories.

We will then modify an existing modelling procedure, and insert ecological, economic, land use and landscape data for the three Biodiversity Exploratories. Finally, we will apply the procedure to derive recommendations for cost-effective agri-environment schemes, which take into account trophic interactions between insect consumers and plant resources. These recommendations will be derived for all three study areas, enabling us to compare cost-effective AES design across space.