Abstract
Gupton Farm supported a nationally important arable flora and fauna until the summer of 2013, when the landowners ended the tenancy agreement and took over the management of the site. Thereafter the landowners abandoned cultivation across large areas of the farm, including those areas hosting a diverse and abundant arable flora and a wintering population of c.12,300 farmland birds. Although similar land-use changes have been applied widely across Europe in the name of agricultural sustainability, sites of known national or international conservation importance have rarely been deliberately degraded or destroyed in the name of nature conservation.
The landowner, one of the four largest landowners in the UK, made the land-use changes at Gupton Farm to enable ‘natural processes’ and ‘sustainable agriculture’ at the expense of the biodiversity interest. The relevant national conservation agency and leading nature conservation NGOs in the UK supported this decision. This case study describes the impact of the land-use changes made in April 2013 on the flora and fauna of Gupton Farm; it also discusses issues relating to good practice in nature conservation management.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Terry and Michael Watkins, not only for their stewardship of such exceptional farmland habitats over the term of their tenancy, but also for their invaluable help in providing the land-use information included in this report. Thanks also to those who helped with collecting and providing data, notably: to Bob Haycock (the BTO representative for Pembrokeshire) for his support with organising and carrying out the wintering bird surveys; to Stephen Evans (BSBI Recorder for Pembrokeshire) for providing the historic plant records; to Cath Shellswell (Plantlife) for producing the arable plant report; and to Phil Wilson for his report on the most cost-effective and efficient options for managing the key arable areas on the site. Finally, thanks to Phil Wilson and to Chris Millican for their comments and recommendations on the drafts of this chapter.
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Hurford, C. (2020). The Impact of Land-Use Change on Arable Plant Habitats and Wintering Farmland Birds on a Farm in South-West Wales, UK. In: Hurford, C., Wilson, P., Storkey, J. (eds) The Changing Status of Arable Habitats in Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59875-4_17
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