Skylark

Although the term management implies direct manipulation, the practice of wildlife conservation and management includes efforts aimed at preserving or restoring rare species and their habitats and indirect manipulation of wildlife populations through modification of habitat or resources.

From: Encyclopedia of Ecology, 2008

See the RSPB advice and support on promoting and practicing wildlife friendly farming.

 

The FAO defines conservation agriculture as - a farming system that promotes minimum soil disturbance (i.e. no tillage), maintenance of a permanent soil cover, and diversification of plant species. It enhances biodiversity and natural biological processes above and below the ground surface, which contribute to increased water and nutrient use efficiency and to improved and sustained crop production. 

Three principles of conservation agriculture:

  • Minimum mechanical soil disturbance - (i.e. no tillage) through direct seed and/or fertilizer placement.
  • Permanent soil organic cover - (i.e. no tillage) through direct seed and/or fertilizer placement.
  • Species diversification - (i.e. no tillage) through direct seed and/or fertilizer placement.

Link to FAO Conservation Agriculture page

 

Related Organisations

Content below is from across the PEP community and is not necessarily endorsed by Stewards or by PEP

Connected Content

GWCT

GWCT is a leading UK charity conducting conservation science to enhance the British countryside for public benefit.

Farming with the Environment - Thirty Years of Allerton Project Research

This book examines, discusses and shares over 30 years’ worth of research from the Allerton Proje

Land Sparing & Land Sharing

Are environmental benefits (carbon, biodiversity...) best served by sharing agricultural land with nature, or by maximising yield in some areas to spare tracts of land exclusively for nature in other areas?  

Rewilding

Rewilding is an approach to restoring biodiversity and ecosystem health by working towards returning habitats back to their natural state. Rewilding is commonly misrepresented as the reintroduction of large and glamorous wild animals and the removal of people and human activity from the landscape, but this is very rarely the case.  

Tony William Powell

Introducing Naturestimeline and Tony William Powell. Benchmarking Birds. A Freelance Contractor offering clients bespoke Avian conservation monitoring projects.  

LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming)

LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming) is the leading charity organisation delivering more sustainable food and farming. They work with farmers, the food industry, scientists and consumers, to inspire and enable sustainable farming that is prosperous, enriches the environment and engages local communities.

NCSPulse PEP
FWAG

Nature Friendly Farming Network

Be part of the solution.

Conservation Evidence

A website that summarises the documented evidence for the effectiveness of conservation actions. This resource is designed to support anyone making decisions about how to maintain and restore biodiversity.

RSK Wilding

If you are a farmer seeking extra revenue for good environmental work on your land, we could help you to access funds.

WWF

WWF supports lots of work on sustainable agriculture in a partnership with Tesco.

WWF Land of Plenty

Land of Plenty is WWF's blueprint for how the agriculture and land use sectors in the UK can help fight climate change and bring nature back to life.

Farming with the Environment - Thirty Years of Allerton Project Research

This book examines, discusses and shares over 30 years’ worth of research from the Allerton Project, a research and demonstration farm in the UK which has been carrying out applied interdisciplinary research to explore and explain the need to adapt the management of farmland for environmental protection and to provide public benefits.

Living England: From Satellite Imagery to a National Scale Habitat Map

Post from Natural England 

Concentrating vs. spreading our footprint: how to meet humanity's needs at least cost to nature

Paper by Andrew Balmford (Cambridge University) in Journal of Zoology on the relative value of la

The potential for land sparing to offset greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture

Scientific paper in Nature Climate Change in 2016 by Antony Lamb, Andrew Balmford & Colle

What Conservationists need to know about Farming

Scientific paper by Andrew Balmford & colleagues in 2012 published in Proceedings of the

ELMs Environmental Land Management schemes

Payments for environmental goods and services

Enhanced Environment

Help us collate the knowledge sources, organisations and initiatives out there that are seeking to improve the farmed environment

Environment

Farming is intricately connected to the environment in various ways. The relationship between agriculture and the environment is a critical aspect of modern farming practices. Please share information, resources, tools and experiences on the multifaceted dimensions of how farming intersects with the environment.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity encompasses all the variety of life on Earth from genes to species, populations, communities and ecosystems. In ecological and environmental sectors, we mostly refer to the biodiversity of plant and animal communities within particular habitats.

FABulous Farmers

FABulous Farmers is a European project supporting farmers in the transition to more agroecological practices on their farms. Soil Association are delivering activity in 3 UK pilot regions – South West England, West Midlands and Wales, with the National Trust leading activity in the East England. The project aims to reduce reliance on external inputs, like chemical fertilisers and pesticides, by encouraging the use of methods and interventions that increase the farm’s Functional AgroBiodiversity (FAB). These are targeted measures of biodiversity in and around the field to improve pollination, pest management, soil and water quality on the farmland.

Agri-environment

This Topic doesn't yet have a Stewarded summary, but connected groups, content and organisations show below. Click the 'Ask to Join' button if you would like to be a Steward for this Topic and provide a summary of current knowledge and recommend useful resources, organisations, networks and projects.

Biodiversity Net Gain

The concept of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is an important component of the UK Government's ambitions to reverse biodiversity loss. It provides a framework for ensuring that development and land management activities leave habitats in a measurably better state than beforehand. 

Green Alliance

Green Alliance is an independent think tank and charity focused on ambitious leadership for the environment.  

Farming for Food & Nature Conference

Natural England provides an exciting opportunity for the farming community to decide the future for sustainable food production and thriving nature. In Birmingham on 28 November.

Black Mountains College

A unique college in and around the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, Wales, to create a future where nature and humans thrive. BMC focuses on the challenge of our times: how to build a fair and just society within safe planetary boundaries. We believe in education that empowers people to build resilience in the face of the climate and ecological crisis. Our approach is built on rethinking traditional learning to foster the skills, creativity, and systems thinking needed for a more sustainable future. Our countryside-based campus is a living classroom, with access to biodiverse landscapes that inspire and challenge our students to connect deeply with nature.

About text formats
Write whatever you want here - this is the main section. You can add links, add pictures and embed videos. To paste text from elsewhere use CTRL+Shift+V to paste without formatting. Add videos by selecting 'Full HTML' below, copying the 'embed html' from the source page (eg Youtube), clicking 'Source' above and pasting where you want the video to appear.
You can upload an image here. It can be jpg, jpeg, gif or png format.
Upload requirements
File

You can upload a file here, such as a pdf report, or MS Office documents, Excel spreadsheet or Powerpoint Slides.

Upload requirements
Authors Order
Add Authors here - you can only add them if they already exist on PEP. Just start writing their name then select to add it. To add multiple authors click the 'Add another item' button below.

Please ensure that you have proof-read your content. Pages are not edited further once submitted and will go live immediately.

Configure the meta tags below.

Use tokens to avoid redundant meta data and search engine penalization. For example, a 'keyword' value of "example" will be shown on all content using this configuration, whereas using the [node:field_keywords] automatically inserts the "keywords" values from the current entity (node, term, etc).

Browse available tokens.
Basic tags

Simple meta tags.

The text to display in the title bar of a visitor's web browser when they view this page. This meta tag may also be used as the title of the page when a visitor bookmarks or favorites this page, or as the page title in a search engine result. It is common to append '[site:name]' to the end of this, so the site's name is automatically added. It is recommended that the title is no greater than 55 - 65 characters long, including spaces.
A brief and concise summary of the page's content, preferably 150 characters or less. Where as the description meta tag may be used by search engines to display a snippet about the page in search results, the abstract tag may be used to archive a summary about the page. This meta tag is no longer supported by major search engines.
Advanced

Meta tags that might not be needed by many sites.

Geo-spatial information in 'latitude; longitude' format, e.g. '50.167958; -97.133185'; see Wikipedia for details.
Geo-spatial information in 'latitude, longitude' format, e.g. '50.167958, -97.133185'; see Wikipedia for details.
Robots
A comma-separated list of keywords about the page. This meta tag is used as an indicator in Google News.
Highlight standout journalism on the web, especially for breaking news; used as an indicator in Google News. Warning: Don't abuse it, to be used a maximum of 7 times per calendar week!
This meta tag communicates with Google. There are currently two directives supported: 'nositelinkssearchbox' to not to show the sitelinks search box, and 'notranslate' to ask Google not to offer a translation of the page. Both options may be added, just separate them with a comma. See meta tags that Google understands for further details.
Used to rate content for audience appropriateness. This tag has little known influence on search engine rankings, but can be used by browsers, browser extensions, and apps. The most common options are general, mature, restricted, 14 years, safe for kids. If you follow the RTA Documentation you should enter RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
Indicate to search engines and other page scrapers whether or not links should be followed. See the W3C specifications for further details.
Sets a cookie on the visitor's browser. Can be in either NAME=VALUE format, or a more verbose format including the path and expiration date; see the link for full details on the syntax.
Tell search engines when to index the page again. Very few search engines support this tag, it is more useful to use an XML Sitemap file.
Control when the browser's internal cache of the current page should expire. The date must to be an RFC-1123-compliant date string that is represented in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), e.g. 'Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:12:56 GMT'. Set to '0' to stop the page being cached entirely.
Open Graph

The Open Graph meta tags are used to control how Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other social networking sites interpret the site's content.

The Facebook Sharing Debugger lets you preview how your content will look when it's shared to Facebook and debug any issues with your Open Graph tags.

The URL of an image which should represent the content. The image must be at least 200 x 200 pixels in size; 600 x 316 pixels is a recommended minimum size, and for best results use an image least 1200 x 630 pixels in size. Supports PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. Should not be used if og:image:url is used. Note: if multiple images are added many services (e.g. Facebook) will default to the largest image, not specifically the first one. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
The URL of an video which should represent the content. For best results use a source that is at least 1200 x 630 pixels in size, but at least 600 x 316 pixels is a recommended minimum. Object types supported include video.episode, video.movie, video.other, and video.tv_show. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically.
A alternative version of og:image and has exactly the same requirements; only one needs to be used. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
The secure URL (HTTPS) of an image which should represent the content. The image must be at least 200 x 200 pixels in size; 600 x 316 pixels is a recommended minimum size, and for best results use an image least 1200 x 630 pixels in size. Supports PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly. Any URLs which start with "http://" will be converted to "https://".
The type of image referenced above. Should be either 'image/gif' for a GIF image, 'image/jpeg' for a JPG/JPEG image, or 'image/png' for a PNG image. Note: there should be one value for each image, and having more than there are images may cause problems.
The date this content was last modified, with an optional time value. Needs to be in ISO 8601 format. Can be the same as the 'Article modification date' tag.
Links an article to an author's Facebook profile, should be either URLs to the author's profile page or their Facebook profile IDs. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically.
The date this content was published on, with an optional time value. Needs to be in ISO 8601 format.
The date this content was last modified, with an optional time value. Needs to be in ISO 8601 format.
The date this content will expire, with an optional time value. Needs to be in ISO 8601 format.
Twitter Cards

A set of meta tags specially for controlling the summaries displayed when content is shared on Twitter.

Notes:
  • no other fields are required for a Summary card
  • Photo card requires the 'image' field
  • Media player card requires the 'title', 'description', 'media player URL', 'media player width', 'media player height' and 'image' fields,
  • Summary Card with Large Image card requires the 'Summary' field and the 'image' field,
  • Gallery Card requires all the 'Gallery Image' fields,
  • App Card requires the 'iPhone app ID' field, the 'iPad app ID' field and the 'Google Play app ID' field,
  • Product Card requires the 'description' field, the 'image' field, the 'Label 1' field, the 'Data 1' field, the 'Label 2' field and the 'Data 2' field.
A description that concisely summarizes the content of the page, as appropriate for presentation within a Tweet. Do not re-use the title text as the description, or use this field to describe the general services provided by the website. The string will be truncated, by Twitter, at the word to 200 characters.
By default Twitter tracks visitors when a tweet is embedded on a page using the official APIs. Setting this to 'on' will stop Twitter from tracking visitors.
The URL to a unique image representing the content of the page. Do not use a generic image such as your website logo, author photo, or other image that spans multiple pages. Images larger than 120x120px will be resized and cropped square based on longest dimension. Images smaller than 60x60px will not be shown. If the 'type' is set to Photo then the image must be at least 280x150px. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
The MIME type for the media contained in the stream URL, as defined by RFC 4337.