People, nature and large herbivores in a shared landscape: A mixed- method study of the ecological and social outcomes from agriculture and conservation

1. In this exploratory study, we employ an interdisciplinary approach to explore po tential synergies and trade- offs between the needs of people and nature in the context of agroecological farming and nature conservation. 2. Ecological field studies and management surveys from six sites were combined with a participatory- deliberative appraisal exercise using the Multi- Criteria Mapping (MCM) method. All six study sites and all four land use options in the appraisal were characterised by the use of large herbivores for agricultural and/ or conservation purposes, to varying degrees, and were located in South- East England. 3. MCM participants identified habitat and species diversity, soil health, food production, provision of education and recreational access, as the principal benefits associated with successful management of such sites. Taken overall, their apprais-als


| Agriculture and biodiversity conservation in the United Kingdom
South-East of England is an example of a challenging environment in which to achieve sustainability, because biodiversity losses and the societal demands for primary production (i.e. food, feed, fuel and fibre; Schulte et al., 2019) are related geographically to population density (Thompson & Jones, 1999). Therefore, an understanding of the synergies and trade-offs of meeting sustainability challenges in densely populated areas is pressing for both policymakers and practitioners. Here, we focus our analysis in the South-East of England for four reasons: (a) the region is highly ecologically degraded and has high human population density; (b) a variety of agroecological farming and conservation/restoration land uses are already being employed and so can be examined; (c) land management support policies and schemes are being redeveloped in the United Kingdom as a result of Brexit, so the country is in a moment of change and potential opportunity; and, (d) it is the authors' local landscape which allowed us to engage more deeply with local issues.

| What do sustainable landscapes look like?
How land is used will have a key bearing on whether and how sustainability challenges are met in the United Kingdom. Different visions of the future are favoured by different communities. For example, the 'Nature Needs Half' campaign seeks to protect 50% of the land and sea for nature by 2030 (NNH, 2020). In contrast, in the United Kingdom, the National Farmers Union has an ambition to maintain the area of farmed land but transition to carbon neutral farming by 2040 (NFU, 2019). These respective visions of the future are consistent with the ideas of 'land sparing', where land is separated for production and conservation, or 'land sharing', where there is integration of production and conservation (Fischer et al., 2014). This framing has been prominent in discussions about creating future landscapes. However, there is an increasing awareness that any national or regional-scale scheme needs to be implemented at the local scale, and that practical implementation considerations are more complex than just evaluating food production against conservation alone (Fischer et al., 2014). Exploring the attitudes towards and the performance of different land management practices can offer insights into how local sites and stakeholders might individually and of saleable meat per unit area, the site that produced the most meat also demonstrated consistently strong performance across many biodiversity metrics.
5. Overall, expert perspectives and the performance of our study sites suggests that combinations of diverse approaches to the management of large herbivores, within a 'wildlife-friendly' envelope, are consistent with providing for the diverse needs of people and nature within shared landscapes.

K E Y W O R D S
agroecology, conservation, ecosystem services, farming, large mammals, multi-criteria mapping, natural capital, rewilding collectively support nature conservation and restoration and produce the goods and services required to meet the needs of people.

| Large herbivores in agriculture and conservation
Large mammalian herbivores (both wild and domestic; ≥10 kg) are important components of wild nature, agriculture and conservation sites, and as such may present a focal point for synergies between food production and conservation. Wild large herbivores are still prevalent over the global terrestrial ecosystem, excluding Antarctica (see Svenning et al., 2016). Over 25% of the terrestrial world is intentionally grazed by domesticated large herbivores, or 'livestock' (e.g. cattle, sheep, goats, pigs;Asner et al., 2004). Conservation grazing, in various forms, is a widely used tool to conserve biodiversity (WallisDeVries et al., 1998). In these instances, the abundance and functional traits (e.g. body mass and foraging strategy) of the large herbivore community, and the way people interact with them plays an important role in determining the quantity and type of food available to humans and carnivores (Gilbert et al., 2018;Sandom et al., 2017), the composition and structure of vegetation and soil (Bakker et al., 2016;Sandom et al., 2014) and direct greenhouse gas emissions (Smith et al., 2010;Springmann et al., 2018). Thus, large herbivores have important implications for the biodiversity the landscape can support and the suite of ecosystem services provisioned.

| Study purpose
In this exploratory study we employ a novel and interdisciplinary methodology to explore (a) expert opinion of what people and nature need and want from agroecological farming and conservation land in South-East England, and (b) how specific land management approaches within agriculture and conservation perform, and are perceived to perform, in delivering those needs. Ultimately, our purpose is to identify management strategies, and in particular how they relate to large herbivores, that reconcile the potential synergies and trade-offs between the needs of people and nature to help inform how ecosystems should be restored in areas of high ecological degradation and human density.

| ME THODOLOGY
This project was explicitly designed to deliver an innovative approach for addressing a complex sustainability question. Stemming from our belief that science to address sustainability requires a combination of (a) seeking a broader perspective, (b) being innovative and (c) taking the time required to explore complexity, the aim of our study design was to better understand the problem, rather than to arrive explicitly at a solution. Therefore, our approach was both interdisciplinary (combining concepts from applied social science and ecology, with both disciplines aiming to inform each other) and used mixed-methods (combining qualitative and quantitative techniques), as a way to 'spread the net wide'. As a corollary to this, sample size and statistical analysis have been limited in favour of breadth of understanding and openness to complexity in our analysis and interpretation (Stirling, 2007(Stirling, , 2010. We hope this approach will inform targeted future research.

| Study design
The study design comprises two interlinked methodological strands: (a) a Multi-Criteria Mapping (MCM) exercise, and (b) ecological field studies and an accompanying site management survey focused on large herbivores. A summary of the techniques used is provided below, with full details available in Supporting Information SI1. Both the MCM exercise and ecological field studies were designed with input from both disciplines and two stakeholder workshops.
We made our site selection for the ecological field studies based on desk research (web searches, informal scoping interviews by telephone and email correspondence with potential candidates) and stakeholder engagement (hosting a half-day workshop and participating in relevant local sector events), after which we com- The two methodological strands were aligned to a common analytical framework that draws upon the categories of ecosystem services (ES) used within the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) and the UK-relevant service themes used by Haines-Young and Potschin (2008) in their report for DEFRA, as outlined by Linstead et al. (2008). This framework was used as a source of conceptual categories for thematic analysis of both the ecological and social scientific data. Specifically, we used the top-level service categories, merging  (Table 1). While recognising that biodiversity underpins ecosystem service delivery-and that Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services are complex and layered concepts (Mace et al., 2012)-we also recognise the intrinsic value of biodiversity and therefore included it as a stand-alone category within the analysis. Not all participant responses will necessarily fit these categories and we discuss these separately, specifically as those cut across the Ecosystem Service categories (referred to hereafter as 'Cross-cutting ES'), or those that are beyond the biodiversity and Ecosystem Service framework (referred to hereafter as 'Residual'; Table 1).

| Multi-Criteria Mapping exercise
The aim of the MCM exercise (Coburn & Stirling, 2016)-which combines structured interviewing and a workshop-was to explore different Benefits obtained from ecosystem processes regulation, such as climate regulation, water purification, natural hazard regulation, waste management, pollination, pest control, soil formation, nutrient cycling and atmospheric oxygen production Products obtained from ecosystems such as food, wood, fresh water, fibre, genetic resources and medicines

Cultural (CES)
Includes non-material human benefits obtained from ecosystems such as recreation, spiritual enrichment and aesthetic values Cross-cutting Criteria that cut across multiple Ecosystem Service categories and so do not fit into any single Ecosystem Service category

Residual
Criteria that go beyond the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service framework understandings of the performance of contrasting management approaches and how they vary depending on the view that is taken. This was achieved by engaging 13 expert interviewees representing different perspectives on the issues-both in policy and practice-surrounding the management of large herbivores in biodiversity conservation and agroecological food production. A perspective is considered 'a grouping of viewpoints that may be seen on the basis of MCM analysis to display certain features in common' (Stirling & Coburn, 2014). For example, participants categorised within the 'farmer' perspective generally prioritised criteria around SRES and viability, while the 'conservation' perspective identified more criteria related to biodiversity. Interviewees were provided with the four contrasting strategies (or 'options') to appraise (this information was provided within a briefing pack; Figure 1) and asked to volunteer any additional options that they thought warranted appraisal in parallel. They were then asked to volunteer their own criteria for conducting the appraisal and led through a scoring process that enabled them to attribute pessimistic (worst-case scenario) and optimistic (best-case scenario) scores for each of the land management options against each of their self-selected appraisal criteria. Participants gave informed consent to participate in this study and approval was given by the University of Sussex Research Ethics Committee to carry out this research.

| Ecological field studies overview
During July and August 2018, we measured six ecological metrics at four randomly situated plots at each site: (a) vegetation structure identification was achieved using morphological traits (pan traps specimens), acoustic recognition (bird calls), visual recognition (camera trap footage) and spectrogram analysis (bat echolocation calls). Five soil samples were also collected from each plot and were analysed for endo-and ecto-mycorrhizae, pH, organic matter, bulk density, content of sand/silt/clay, phosphorous, potassium and magnesium.

| Management survey
Site managers of the six study sites were invited to participate in an online management survey, constructed using Qualtrics.

| MCM analysis
The 13 MCM interviewees' self-selected appraisal criteria were reviewed and structured into the Biodiversity, Ecosystem Service and Residual categories framework based on a conceptual proximity between the categories (summarised in Table 1)  These data were also considered according to the different perspectives and issues.

| Ecological analysis
We used the ecological and management survey data to make relative assessments of sites contribution to Biodiversity, and SRES, PES and CES delivery. For Biodiversity, we considered species-focused metrics (taxon-specific-birds, bats, invertebrates, mammals-species richness, abundance, diversity and protected status metrics). For SRES, we considered soil nutrient traits, soil organic matter (SOM) and endomycorrhizae. For CES, we considered recreational use (number of people and diversity of activities). For PES, we considered the quantity of meat production and meat sale price.
All metrics for Biodiversity, SRES and CES were standardised across all sites so that the best performing plot for a particular metric scored a 1 and the other plots were scaled against this metric score (standardised metric plot score = plot metric score/ maximum metric score). Quantity of meat production was standardised at the site level as there is no relevant plot scale data.
Site's maximum and minimum plot score, highest and lowest plot mean score, and the overall site median were calculated for all metrics regardless of category association (Combined in Figure 3) and for the specified set of metrics in each category (Biodiversity, SRES and CES in Figure 3). This approach was designed to allow a degree of comparison between the MCM and ecological methodologies. Both methods use a standardised scale, a form of best-case and worst-case scenario, and use multiple metrics to assess Biodiversity, and SRES and CES delivery performance.
However, they are not directly equivalent because of: (a) differences between the MCM options and ecological sites, (b) different assessment metrics used to assess Biodiversity, and SRES and CES delivery performance for the MCM and ecological methods.
Moreover, (c) the ecological data are limited by the maximum score recorded at our study sites while the MCM approach is not.

South-East England
Of the 67 appraisal criteria volunteered by MCM interviewees, just over 70% of these (49)  Of the 14 criteria relating to biodiversity, both diversity of habitats and diversity of species were frequently mentioned and generally distinguished from each other, with diversity being universally understood as a positive feature. In addition to two mentions of specific target habitats (chalk downland, woodland, marsh/bog) and key/rare species (insects and pollinators), interviewees were concerned with habitat and species diversity more generally, across a variety of habitats and species.
Of the seven criteria relating to SRES, soil health (construed in terms of fertility, sustainability, regeneration, carbon sequestration and capacity for climate regulation) featured much more prominently (i.e. within five criteria, each volunteered by different participants) than any other issues that were mentioned, which included air quality, water quality, flood water management and climate change objectives. In contrast, two interviewees focused on ecological processes which relate more directly to supporting services, mentioning the importance of 'interactions between plants and animals' (landowner from Council) and the maintenance of 'healthy ecosystems' (director of Tablehurst).
Of the 13 criteria that relate to PES, food dominated. Indeed, with 11 separate criteria relating to it, the provision of food was considered in terms of both its utilitarian value (relating to quality, quantity and variety), as well as its contribution towards extrinsic values (such as affordability, security and sustainability). Otherwise, only energy provision (generation of renewable energy balanced against fossil fuel use) and water availability (sustainability of abstractions and quality/degree of pollution) were volunteered as criteria of this sort.
Education and health emerged as the most prominent concerns across the 13 criteria that were found to correspond to CES.
Education was construed in terms of learning opportunities for both members of the public and farmers, whereas health was construed in terms of public access to the countryside for exercise and recreation, rather than a concern for the occupational health of farmers.
Both engagement of the local community in the running of the site, as well as the development of rural (particularly agricultural) infrastructures, were also given a place within these criteria by multiple interviewees, while only one interviewee mentioned 'Beauty', volunteering it as a criterion in its own right (landowner from Knepp).
The 18

| Site performance for people and nature
A numerical summary of the described below is available in Table B (Supporting Information SI3). When analysing site performance across all metrics, all sites are making important contributions to the needs of people and nature (i.e. all sites have plots that score a maximum score of 1 for at least one metric; Figure 3). There was a F I G U R E 2 Multi-Criteria Mapping rank chart showing the aggregate ranks for the core options, calculated using pessimistic (hypothetical worst-case scenario) and optimistic (hypothetical best-case scenario) scores assigned by all perspectives using all criteria. The 'rank extrema' (black bars) represent the full variability in the ranks assigned by different participants, and the 'rank means' (orange boxes) the distribution of participants' ranks within the full ranges F I G U R E 3 Standardised summary of site performance for all metrics ('Combined'), and sets of metrics for 'Biodiversity', Supporting and Regulating Ecosystem Services ('SRES') and Cultural Ecosystem Services ('CES') categories. Line ends represent each site's maximum and minimum plot score, box ends represent the highest and lowest plot mean scores for the relevant metrics, and black points represent the overall site median for the relevant metrics in each category across all plots. A score of 1 represents the highest scoring plot for each metric, and score of 0 is an absolute zero for that metric. Colour indicates site: Tablehurst-Agroecological Farm 1, Ashdown-Conservation Site 1, Knepp-Rewilding Estate, Butcherlands-Conservation Site 2, Council-Peri-urban Nature Reserve, Saddlescombe-Agroecological Farm 2 wide variability in performance for all metrics across the four plots at each site, with all sites having plots that perform the best and worst for at least one Biodiversity or SRES metric (Figure 3). Our CES and PES metrics, limited to recreation and meat production, respectively, mean Peri-urban and agricultural sites dominate these ecosystem services respectively.

Species richness, abundance, diversity and protection metrics
All sites except for Council have at least one plot that scored the highest for at least one taxon-specific species-focused metric ( Figure 3). Council and Butcherlands on average perform similarly and marginally better across the biodiversity metrics compared to other sites. Tablehurst and Saddlescombe are also strong performers, on average performing marginally better than their paired sites.
In total, 146 species or morphospecies were recorded across all taxa, across all sites. Tablehurst (83) , human use (green; human activity, H' activity diversity index and meat production), vegetation structure (blue; plot scale proportion ground, shrub or tree layer) and soil health (purple; mycorrhizal colonisation, soil organic matter and phosphorus) measured at the six study sites: Ashdown-Conservation Site 1 (A), Butcherlands-Conservation Site 2 (B), Council-Peri-urban Nature Reserve (C), Tablehurst-Agroecological Farm 1 (T), Knepp-Rewilding Estate (K) and Saddlescombe-Agroecological Farm 2 (S). Each score is the mean across the four plots for each site, except for meat production which is a site estimate. Each category has been scaled against the maximum value recorded across the six sites more prevalent in plots at Knepp (mean 77%), Ashdown (55%) and Butcherlands (52%), while ground vegetation dominates at the agroecological farms: Tablehurst (97%) and Saddlescombe (88%). Plots on Council have the most inter-plot diversity of vegetation structure with ground vegetation and shrubs well-represented (Figure 4).

Beta diversity
Within site (i.e. between plots situated on the same site) species dissimilarity varied from 0.32 on Butcherlands to 0.67 on Council.
Between site (i.e. between plots situated on different sites) beta diversity varied from 0.53 for Tablehurst to 0.64 for Council. Despite having low overall species richness, both within sites and between sites, Council had the greatest dissimilarity of species recorded. All sites had average between-site dissimilarity >0.5 (mean 0.56), indicating important variation in species records between sites. Withinsite dissimilarity was lower (mean 0.45) but still variable, highlighting the variability between plots within site.

Supporting and Regulating Ecosystem Services
Our SRES metrics, all relating to soil, record Tablehurst as the highest performing site, and noticeably higher compared to its paired site Ashdown ( Figure 3). Soil fertility (nutrient availability in the soil) was found to be low via the DEFRA Index Scale at five of the six sites ( Figure 4), averaging very low (Ashdown) to low across the major nutrients: phosphorus, potassium and magnesium (DEFRA, 2010

Cultural Ecosystem Services
The CES metrics used to create Figure 3 are limited to record human use and activity at the plots. As such the sites close to Brighton and Hove, a city with a population of ~300,000 people performed particularly well. The camera traps recorded five times more people (960) than wild mammals (171)  Council and Saddlescombe (Figure 4). Human activity was highly variable with 10 plots recording no human activity, and no people were recorded at Butcherlands. It is notable that two Council plots recorded over 200 people and two plots recorded only two people.
At Saddlescombe, three plots recorded fewer than 10 people and one 179.

Provisioning ecosystem services
Across the sites, harvesting of cattle, sheep, pigs and/or fallow deer was reported. Only from Butcherlands were no livestock harvested. Tablehurst reported harvesting 50 cattle per year (0.23 cattle ha −1 year −1 ), considerably greater than other sites ( Figure 5). Total production for all livestock species was estimated for each site using a standardised estimated body weight for each species (Supporting Information SI1) and based on self-reported data. This was greatest at Tablehurst (121 kg ha −1 year −1 ; Figure 4). At the other sites where livestock were harvested, production ranged from 6 kg ha −1 year −1 on Council land to 44 kg ha −1 year −1 at Saddlescombe.
All five sites producing meat sold their meat at above market prices.

| Summary
The criteria our stakeholders identified to appraise the performance of agroecological farming and biodiversity conservation/restoration sites focused on biodiversity, soil health, food production, and human health and education. Of the four land management options explored in the MCM exercise, the stakeholders ranked the Agroecological Farm the best across the stakeholder-selected appraisal criteria.
However, it is also clear there is perceived variation in option performance across the different criteria and from different perspectives.
This means agroecological farming is not perceived to be the best or most favoured land use to meet all the separate needs of people and nature, but is perceived to be the most multi-functional and best compromise. To some extent, our ecological studies support this perception when focusing only on food production and biodiversity conservation. For example, Tablehurst was notable in having the highest meat production and recording the highest total species richness as well as performing well across the species diversity metrics. However, when taking into account all the stakeholder criteria measured, the overall site performances were very similar to each other because of the variation in site performance across the full diversity of metrics.
In the context of the UN's Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, our results suggest consideration should be given to how a diversity of land management and restoration approaches, along the spectrum of agroecological farming to nature conservation, can be supported to create ecosystems that can provide diverse benefits for people and nature.

| What do people and nature need and want from agroecological and conservation land in South-East England?
The 67 appraisal criteria recorded in the MCM exercise suggest that in South-East England agroecological and conservation land management can at least be assessed against: (a) the amount and variety of affordable, high-quality food produced, (b) the richness, abundance, diversity,and rarity of species and habitats supported,  (Jones et al., 2011;Pereira et al., 2013). Despite the challenges created by the need for diverse outcomes, it is important to keep complexity within decision-making (Stirling, 2010) and avoiding over-simplifying the discussion, as has arguably happened in the 'land sharing versus sparing' debate (Fischer et al., 2014). Our study not only makes this explicit, but also offers a means for these to be considered in a systematic way.

| Which agroecological farming and conservation land management approaches are delivering those needs?
All sites are making contributions to providing a home for nature and have good soil quality and all sites except Butcherlands are provisioning meat produce and recorded people using the site.
Despite the good individual site performances, it is perhaps more important to consider the collective performance of our sites and how they complement each other, in order to highlight the synergies and trade-offs between different land management options: Ashdown and Tablehurst are geographically close but differ in their soil, vegetation structure, species composition and landscape appearance ( Figure 5). Tablehurst has the fertile soil, vegetation structure and large herbivore stocking densities to produce more meat compared to our other sites, while supporting relatively high species richness and diversity. In contrast, Ashdown has comparatively infertile soil that supports some regionally rare habitat and species not supported by other sites, but also with lower large herbivore stocking densities and levels of food production. Data from these sites suggest that the higher large herbivore stocking densities we investigated are not incompatible with supporting a biodiverse and multi-functional environment, but that these conditions are not suitable for all species and habitats.
Knepp and Butcherlands are similar in many metrics, despite differences in their large herbivore management strategies.
Butcherlands is a relatively small site (39 ha) and livestock are moved in and out of site to create temporally diverse grazing and browsing dynamics. Knepp's southern block is relatively large in comparison (421 ha) and supports a higher variety of permanent large herbivores but with spatially diverse grazing and browsing dynamics (Dando, 2018). It is worth noting that after conventional agricultural practices ceased at Knepp, there followed a period of large herbivore absence (3-8 years, as fields were taken out of production in different years) which allowed a period of vegetation community reestablishment. The comparison between these sites highlights the potential for reducing the frequency and intensity of human management with increasing size of site when working with natural processes (Sandom et al., 2013). It is also important to note that our selection of sites and metrics limits our overall understanding of synergies and tradeoffs between land management options. For example, our sites are not maximising food production and the price premiums on meat produced indicate collectively that they are not producing high quantities of affordable meat products. Nor did we assess the full variety of criteria and metrics such as the financial viability or ethical standards of the operation. Adding more conventional forms of agriculture and increasing the criteria studied to the research design would help expand the scope of the study to further understand the synergies and trade-offs between these land management strategies at a regional scale.

| Did our mixed and interdisciplinary methodology work?
We designed the project with ambitions of conducting a broad sustainability assessment, albeit with a bias towards meat production and biodiversity conservation. While we were not able to cover all criteria highlighted by the MCM interviewees in our site surveying, our coverage was broad (Table A, Supporting Information SI2).
The range of biodiversity criteria described by our interviewees relates well to both a set of 'essential biodiversity variables' reported by Pereira et al. (2013), and the biodiversity metrics we analysed through ecological field measures. However, our biodiversity metrics were a snapshot in time and limited to four taxonomic groups.
Financial and logistical constraints prevented this exploratory study from monitoring additional taxonomic groups for a longer period, for example, the entire breeding season (and hence, peak activity) of all the study groups (e.g. Balfour et al., 2018). Unfortunately, the true costs of long-term monitoring are commonly underestimated (Caughlan & Oakley, 2001). Our experiences indicate that despite recent advances in ecological monitoring techniques (e.g. bat and bird acoustics, camera trapping), field-based, simultaneous, long-term measurement of multiple biodiversity metrics across multiple sites will be limited by financial constraints.
Our measures of food provision were even more limited as compared to the criteria described by participants. Interviewees highlighted the quantity of provision, which we were able to estimate, but also meat quality (taste, nutrition, carcass quality and safety), variety (including non-meat products), sustainability of supply (financial and environmental), affordability, availability, food security (locally, nationally, globally) and prioritisation, which we did not measure at our study sites. Within SRES, soil was a notable consideration for many interviewees that was highlighted as a priority in the first stakeholder engagement workshop and was added to our ecological field study as a result. A variety of CES were also highlighted as important success criteria, including recreational access, which we were able to measure by proxy, but also education, community involvement, opportunities for social care, support for rural communities, employment opportunities and retaining traditional knowledge, which were not quantified.
We are aware that many other categories of ES are delivered from these sites beyond those recorded. Our intention is that the selection of services reported herein provides an indication of the different types of benefits that can be delivered from each site-focusing on those services that were found to be most relevant to a range of stakeholders from the South-East of England.
Unfortunately, ecosystem management is a wickedly complex, multifaceted problem (DeFries & Nagendra, 2017) and the cost, resources and time required to monitor biodiversity, ES and other key variables are likely to be prohibitively expensive and present a challenge to policies seeking to ensure that public money is spent on delivering public goods and services (DEFRA, 2020).

| Implications for policy
Our results suggest that challenges for delivering a land management subsidy scheme that uses public money to deliver public goods and services include: (a) identifying what people and nature need in any particular location, (b) prioritising support appropriately in space and time and (c) identifying monitoring metrics and targets to assess whether land management is meeting society's needs while also maintaining healthy and sustainable ecosystems. If these challenges can be overcome, this policy frame could help restore diverse ecosystems, supported by diverse land management practices, that provide for the diverse needs of people and nature.
Further work could incorporate MCM, ecological assessment and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to enable a more context-sensitive and spatially explicit understanding of these issues and support decision-making within the South-East of England and further afield. Current debates in the United Kingdom provide an opportunity for enhanced interdisciplinary studies such as this to pioneer broader and more flexible methods that can cater for locally specific needs. These could in turn inform decision processes across the EU and at the level of individual EU Member States, and also contribute to more diverse international efforts during the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.