H a higher percentage of agricultural land and lower and much more fragmented cover of

H a higher percentage of agricultural land and lower and much more fragmented cover of woodlands, broadening the range of site variables included in the study. To enable the establishment of a robust natural experiment, we utilised a systematic process to choose appropriate woodland websites within the two study landscapes. This method was informed by a comprehensive literature review, performed because the initial step from the project (see Humphrey et al. 2015). The critique PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21249649 identified the variables which can influence biodiversity within fragmented forest landscapes and reviewed the current proof base. The assessment identified 3 patch or site-level variables: (i) patch area/size; (ii) patch characteristics/quality, equating towards the measures of within-patch configuration, structure, or composition, one example is, tree or plant species richness, tree size; and (iii) website age/ecological continuity, the length of time tree cover has been present (ecological continuity can differ from tree age as a consequence of ecological succession or management). Three landscapelevel variables were also identified: (iv) amount of surrounding habitat, measured as the amount, extent, or proportion of comparable vegetation surrounding every single target patch; (v) degree of spatial isolation, typically defined as a distance or connectivity measure for the nearest related habitat patch; and (vi) nature with the surrounding matrix, the quantity, extent, or proportion of various land-uses surrounding a target habitat patch, for instance, percentage cover of agricultural or urban land. The overview also revealed the basic paucity of proof, with only 4 out of 104 studies examining all six variables simultaneously, and only 29 examining 5 or a lot more (Humphrey et al. 2015). 4 of your variables above were made use of as criteria for picking a shortlist of web sites for field study: (i) patcharea/size; (iii) web site age/ecological continuity; (iv) quantity of surrounding habitat; and (v) degree of spatial isolation. This balanced the need to have to identify sites with combinations of a broad range of variables plus the want for an approach that was amenable to desk-based analysis, offered the really huge variety of woodland web sites inside the study places that could possibly be deemed. We applied a GIS-based internet site selection approach primarily based around the following measures: 1 We identified spatially discrete (i.e., not joining or forming part of another woodland) native broadleaved QS11 web woodlands (>80 broadleaved canopy cover) from national woodland GIS information sets (National Forest Inventory ?Forestry Commission, 2012). two We excluded any websites that had been classified as ancient (i.e., pre-1750s in Scotland or pre-1600 in England) on GIS data sets of ancient woodland (Forestry Commission, 2011). This was to ensure a focus on secondary woodlands that had been planted on agricultural land and whose biodiversity would be the outcome of subsequent colonization as opposed to relict populations. 3 Within ArcGIS Desktop ten (Sophisticated license, http:// www.esri.com/), we measured the first 3 choice criteria: (i) patch area/size; (iv) amount of surrounding habitat (proportion cover of broadleaved woodland with a 3-km buffer); and (v) degree of spatial isolation (measured as the distance to the nearest neighboring broadleaved woodland). For each and every, we calculated data quartiles that were subsequently utilized to ensure the final selection of web pages captured the widest feasible selection of variables. four We iteratively selected suitable web pages in GIS till we accomplished a fantastic spread acr.