Declining number of Great Crested Newts

Yes, I would agree with Gemma re bang for your buck.  I am not advocating a sledgehammer approach, but rather a broad brush one.  Small populations are certainly valuable especially if isolated and the only ones for some distance (as we often have in London, for example).  However I think it is time for a review of the way that individual animals are often more highly valued by the Law than populations, given that the original rationale for protection under the W and C Act was often to protect species where there were genuinely only a handful of individuals in the UK (eagles, ospreys etc) - not so applicable to small animals lower down the food chain like GCN.  I certainly would not like a developer to use digging a couple of ponds to offset loss of animals on site as an easy way out, but on the other hand, as Gemma says, think what could be done with 70Ks worth of exclusion fencing spent on habitat creation and management to enhance the local and even regional status of GCN...    

will wrote: - which is why, in my very humble opinion, the law needs to be changed to recognise the importance of conserving populations (ie the integrity of the species) and so a developer would pay to create 50 ponds, say, at a thousand pounds each, rather than spending the same money shifting half a dozen GCN from being squashed (which is probably a fraction of the number that get squashed by cars on the road next to the development in a single night once the proud new owners of the houses have moved in to them...)

It's not the law that needs to be changed - the Habs Directive and subsequently the Conservation Regulations are sufficiently strong - it's their interpretation by SNCOs that need to alter. When it comes to article 16 derogations, the maintenance of populations of things like GCNs at a favourable conservation status in their natural range, should be able to be achieved in a strategic way with developer contributions, rather than relying purely on site-by-site mitigation.

MancD wrote: The offences under the Habs Regs protect individual newts and their habitats so it wouldn't be possible for NE to simply issue a licence committing a developer to dig some new ponds in the countryside and hope for the best. Any such licence would by default have to permit the potential destruction of breeding sites/resting places and the killing/injuring of newts if no capture or exclusion was proposed. If a developer was required to provide funds for pond creation elsewhere in the county, or for management of a large newt population nearby, this would obviously be beneficial for those populations, but failure to mitigate the impacts at the development site level could leave the affected population facing extinction. It may only be a small population but it could be a critical link in a wider metapopulation.

As above, the Directive speaks of mainenance of FCS of populations in the neatural range. Granted, this wouldn't be as simple as digging a few ponds elswhere and hoping for the best, but equally I don't see why, in law, contributions to a strategic scheme, which if successful would demonstrably enhance the FCS of the species as a whole, is not possible. I don't agree that the plural 'populations' in the text of article 16 refers to individual ponds; maybe there's been a ruling on this, I don't know.

I can see that if a population is part of a strategic link through some sort of ecological bottleneck, then it would have to be preserved in situ. But equally, I can think of any number of ponds which are totally isolated and not contributing to any metpopulation or wider population, and probably never will. Should these populations be in some sort of managed decline, whilst contribution from developers which would otherwise be spent on mitigation at that site could instead be used to manage and enhance the strategically important populations?

To counter this the 'Countryside on your doorstep' argument is used, whereby people are entitled to see the fragments of semi-natural habitat, and the species that they support, at the end of their street preserved for their enjoyment, inspiration, education etc, rather than lost to development subject to compensatory habitats provided potentially many miles from where they live.

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Is it known at what area of terrestrial habitat, compared to pond size, this point is reached?

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GemmaJF wrote: How does that sit with the wording of the WCA? Is it not a case that GCN are specifically protected as individual animals? I know in my own experience and with many other consultants the reason we are being paid by developers is to protect them from prosecution under that act. This almost invariably will involve fencing and capture to achieve this to a reasonable level. Most other legislation is looked at as additional consideration the project will invariably primarily be aimed at protecting the client from prosecution and in practice anything else depends how persuasive and inventive the consultant involved is.

I think that's the point in that the legislation pertaining to these species is too focused on preserving the life of the individual animal rather than the function of the species as a whole in the ecosystem.

Hence we see the headlines of £XK per newt/dormouse etc, that do no-one any good

None of us like to see animals get hurt but these are meant to be species conservation regulations not animal welfare regulations. Preserving the life of the individual is not necessarily the most efficient way of maintaining a species, in terms of point of focus of conservation efforts, no matter how unpalatable that may be.

I don't know, would private ecological consultants prefer to be involved in creative, wider ecosystem management schemes, than bucketing herps from one site to another?