A method for habitat assessment in agricultural landscapes

The need for a conservation policy for remnant semi-natural vegetation in the agricultural landscape of lowland Britain is stressed. An essential prerequisite for such a policy involves the formulation of a method for habitat assessment which may provide relevant ecological information to planners, land owners and land managers. Existing techniques of ecological evaluation and their problems are briefly reviewed and a new approach, habitat inventory analysis, is described. In addition to measures of habitat and species diversity, variables related to the size and fragmentation of remnant habitats are emphasized and the potential of selected techniques of multivariate analysis for ordering the data is demonstrated. Examples of the use of the method in parts of Cornwall and Dorset are presented and the complete methodology is critically discussed.