UK biodiversity stripes (priority species) 1970 – 2019
Biodiversity is all nature; the variety of all life on Earth, from animals and plants to fungi and micro-organisms like bacteria. Biodiversity stripes are a visual indication of the health of the biodiversity around us (represented by tracking 224 UK priority species) and how it’s changed over time. Shades of green indicate healthier-than-average years, while grey is worse than the average. The decline of green to yellow to greyness on the right-hand side of the graphic shows just how rapidly this biodiversity has been declining.
Sadly, the UK is already one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, as documented by the world-leading study, State of Nature. Across the UK, the species studied have declined on average by 19% since 1970 and nearly one-in-six species are threatened with extinction from Great Britain.
Why do we care? As Sir David Attenborough has said in the past, “if we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves.” Biodiversity – the different animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms – provides our basis for life by ensuring we have clean air and water; producing fertile soils and all of our food; making the raw materials for medicines and keeping our climate in balance.
Urgent action can reverse some of this biodiversity loss and the more damage of recent decades. Many people in the UK want to do this, as demonstrated in the People’s Plan for Nature, but may not know how. For real-world examples of what we can do together, browse over 300 nature stories and 200 food & agriculture stories shared by different organisations and groups across the UK who have taken action.
Many local areas already have comprehensive plans for nature in place. Is your area one of them?
Check out the area where you live to find out more:
We have a chance to reverse the drastic decline in biodiversity – in our towns and cities as well as the countryside; in our seas and rivers as well as on land. Ending this massive loss is not only urgent and essential, but also protects and enriches our own lives. As many species hurtle toward extinction, there’s no time to lose.
Footnote on biodiversity stripes:
Measuring biodiversity change is a lot more complicated than measuring temperature change for Warming Stripes. Fortunately, the UK has lots of information about its biodiversity, collected across a broad spread of species and habitats both by professionals and by expert volunteers. This information provides an essential source of evidence for reporting biodiversity change and the impact of our actions to restore biodiversity.
The indicator selected to measure biodiversity change is the relative abundance of UK “priority species”. Priority species are defined by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) as those appearing on one or more of the biodiversity lists of each UK nation: Natural Environmental and Rural Communities Act 2006 – Section 41 (England), Environment (Wales) Act 2016 section 7, Scottish Biodiversity List, Northern Ireland Priority Species List.
This combined list contains 2,890 priority species in total. These species have been highlighted by ecologists because they are of conservation concern for a variety of reasons, including their scarcity, their iconic nature or a rapid decline in their population.
There are species on the list for which little monitoring or occurrence data are available. This is due to practical reasons (such as difficulty of detection or rarity) as well as monitoring challenges (where methods can be unreliable or simply unavailable). Of the 2,890 species on the combined priority species list, there are 224 priority species that have robust, quantitative time-series data of relative abundance.
These 224 species make up the indicator visualised in the biodiversity stripes, and include birds (103), butterflies (24), mammals (13) and moths (84). Although these species are not representative of wider species in general (for example, there are no fish, reptiles, fungi or plants), they do include a range of taxonomic groups that respond to the kinds of environmental pressures that collective actions aim to address – including land use changes, climate change, invasive species and pollution.
The UK biodiversity stripes contain public sector information from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. They are produced by Miles Richardson at the University of Derby and can be downloaded at www.biodiversitystripes.info
