YES-27-B-03: Unseen blue-greenways: Connectivity and ecosystem functioning along canals
Communities of species interact across habitats and across multiple types of interaction, or foraging “guilds”, (e.g. pollinator and herbivore communities can share the same plants, or larval herbivores can become adult pollinators). With increased landscape fragmentation, preserving and improving connectivity for mobile species becomes increasingly important. However, despite important cross-boundary effects, landscape connectivity research typically focusses on linking single habitats and guilds (e.g. just pollinators through connected grasslands). This within-habitat, single guild focus means we risk missing important cross-boundary implications such as those between terrestrial and aquatic systems. For instance, predatory fish can indirectly improve terrestrial pollination by reducing dragonfly numbers (dragonfly larvae are prey to fish and adults are predators of pollinators).
To truly improve connectivity, we need to understand how multi-habitat, multi-guild aquatic, “blue”, and terrestrial, “green”, communities are structured and how communities of interacting species move through the landscape. Canals, by design, connect aquatic habitats, but there is little-to-no research on the terrestrial habitat alongside them, despite this potentially acting as multiple habitat corridors through otherwise degraded urban and agricultural landscapes through much of the UK, and elsewhere. These unseen “blue-greenways” likely support diverse multi-guild communities and thus have important implications for the wider landscape. As blue-greenways with relatively consistent properties (e.g. flow, width) and single-owner management at the national-scale, canals are a perfect model system to address ecological questions on landscape-scale connectivity, community stability and ecosystem function, and cross-boundary spill-over effects.
This project, co-developed with Canal & River Trust (CRT), will determine how blue-greenways can support movement and ecosystem service provision of multiple terrestrial and aquatic insect communities. Specifically, we will collect empirical data to determine how blue-greenways affect (1) communities of terrestrial plants, pollinators, herbivores, parasitoids, and insectivores, (2) communities of freshwater algae and fungi, aquatic grazers, and shredders. Then, using state-of-the-art multi-layer ecological network modelling that quantifies interactions across habitats and guilds, we will model community structure, function and movement at the landscape-scale; (3) experimentally test how far these communities and their effects can spill-over into surrounding agricultural landscapes, measuring pollination success and pest control services with potted strawberry plants; and (4) collaborate with CRT to ensure results are widely disseminated and feed into real-world action and knowledge exchange.
Improving landscape connectivity is a key goal at a national scale to make natural landscapes “bigger, better and more joined up” and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for increased connectivity in blue and green spaces. Thus, our research has important implications for ecological understanding, landscape management and policy implementation. Collaborating with CRT ensures practical uptake of outcomes to improve landscape connectivity, biodiversity uplift and community function at a national-scale and using existing infrastructure. The outcomes of this project can be extended to other blue-greenways, globally, and, through established links between CRT, National Rail and National Highways, to thousands of kilometres of additional linear infrastructure (e.g. railways and road verges); potentially re-defining how we manage landscapes for connectivity.
Relevant reading: