Article written by Dan Hoare. Director of Conservation at Butterfly Conservation

Something is stirring across the UK’s landscapes, a rumbling that challenges the concept of a green and pleasant land. Many of our iconic landscapes are rightly celebrated for their striking visual beauty, their flora and fauna, and their character and cultural history, but their future is a matter of heated debate. From the Kent coast to the Cairngorms, the Antrim peatlands to the Norfolk Broads, how our landscapes are used is being reconsidered in the light of the unfolding climate and biodiversity crisis. There is much talk of nature recovery, of natural climate solutions, alternative approaches to land management, from regenerative agriculture to rewilding, but also tensions over the consequences for access, food production and rural livelihoods.

Butterfly Conservation has long recognised the need for taking action at a landscape scale, and has been a pioneer of big picture conservation for threatened species for two decades. In that time we’ve worked in more than 100 landscapes across the UK, raising more than £8m for conservation action that has helped us turn around the fortunes of many of our most threatened butterflies and moths. This work has prevented the extinction of the Heath Fritillary, High Brown Fritillary and Black-veined Moth. It’s recovered populations of Marsh Fritillary and Duke of Burgundy across much of their range. And it’s shown how species like the Grey Carpet, Dingy Skipper and Small Blue can be restored across extensive areas through habitat management.

Making connections

Butterflies have also been extensively studied as a model for understanding the way species function within a landscape, revealing the patterns of local extinction and colonisation from sites that combine to form a metapopulation, an extensive population using interconnected networks of suitable habitat in our fragmented land.

For us, landscape-scale conservation means the co-ordinated conservation and management of habitats for a range of species across a large natural area, often made up of a network of sites. By targeting work to improve the extent and quality of suitable habitat for a species, and improving connectivity within and between sites, populations can recover and move around a landscape, allowing them to recolonise former sites and discover newly recreated habitat patches.

Measuring how populations respond to habitat change – through the incredible recording efforts of Butterfly Conservation volunteers – provides the proof that landscape restoration is working. Butterflies and moths are now well established as excellent indicators of nature recovery at scale, and often act as a flagship for broader restoration efforts to benefit wildlife.

In landscapes like the Brecks, the Morecambe Bay Limestones, the Cotswolds and Rockingham Forest, we work with partners to ensure that management targeting a particular butterfly or moth makes an impact for other threatened species, from plants and beetles to bats and birds. Our experience shows that for many rare and threatened butterflies and moths, targeted work is necessary to restore and expand their habitats but that many can respond quite quickly when conditions are right. Where we have been able to sustain that work over several years, populations can recover spectacularly, as we’ve seen with Duke of Burgundy in the North York Moors and Heath Fritillary in the Blean Woods of Kent, with both species recently seeing the biggest population counts for 20 years.

Next steps

Some of the challenges we now face mean we need to redouble our efforts. Creating networks of large, interconnected and varied habitats is one of the best things we can do to help species respond to our rapidly changing climate. We aim to build dynamic landscapes in which butterflies and moths can move around and choose from a range of conditions, offering the best hope of resilience in the face of changes to climate and land use. By aligning our research with our landscape programmes we can help provide evidence on how wildlife and people can adapt to new conditions.

Fortunately, many of the nature-based solutions proposed to help fight the climate crisis also provide opportunities for species: our peatland work in Scotland shows how restoring peat bog habitats brings benefits for threatened species like the Large Heath as well as for carbon sequestration and water flow.

Our partnerships have been key to everything we have achieved in more than 20 years of landscape conservation. The successes we have seen are the result of an incredible collective effort. Our ambitious new strategy aims to take this work to another level, with a pledge to measurably improve the condition of 100 of the UK’s most important landscapes for butterflies and moths over the next five years. We know the recipe for landscape success, so now we need to build new partnerships to ensure the UK’s treasured landscapes are places where butterflies and moths can thrive.