Agri-environment schemes play a central role in delivering environmental policies in England. It is important to understand how these schemes are delivering for birds and other target species, including invertebrates such as bush-crickets. Bush-crickets and other mobile invertebrates may move to land under agri-environment scheme management to make use of new and/or improved resources. Such resources could increase local abundance but might not necessarily lead to wider-scale population increases, so we need to understand more about their use.
Information on bush-crickets collected using passive acoustic monitoring devices for the Landscape-scale species monitoring of agri-environment schemes project were passed through BTO's Acoustic Pipeline. The pipeline has acoustic classifiers that enable the identification of bush-cricket calls in a highly automated manner. Although these data were collected as 'by-catch' during bat monitoring work, they provide an opportunity to investigate the effects of agri-environment scheme management gradients on bush-crickets for the first time at both the local and landscape scales.
Field data from three years of baseline surveys (2018, 2019 and 2021) from the 54 survey squares included recordings of six different bush-cricket species, with sufficient data for the analysis of four of these: Dark Bush-cricket (Pholidoptera griseoaptera), Long-winged Conehead (Conocephalus fuscus), Roesel’s Bush-cricket (Roeseliana roeselii), and Speckled Bush-cricket (Leptophyes punctatissima).
The strongest evidence for the effects of agri-environment scheme interventions – and/or habitat – was found for Long-winged Conehead and Speckled Bush-cricket, indicating that habitat of high quality with suitable AES intervention can increase bush-cricket presence locally. There was little or no evidence of relationships for Dark Bush-cricket and Roesel’s Bush-cricket, the latter unsurprising given the extensive presence of this species.
The results provide a baseline assessment of the impacts of agri-environment scheme management on bush-cricket species at both local and landscape scales.
Ward, C., Henderson, I. & Newson, S.E. (2025). Bush Cricket assemblages and impacts of Agri-environment scheme interventions. Report to Natural England and Defra: LM04149. (Access the report on the Defra science website)