Restoration of degraded land is recognized by the international community as an important way of enhancing both biodiversity and ecosystem services, but more information is needed about its costs and benefits. In Cambridgeshire, U.K., a long-term initiative to convert drained, intensively farmed arable land to a wetland habitat mosaic is driven by a desire both to prevent biodiversity loss from the nationally important Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve (Wicken Fen NNR) and to increase the...

Functional traits that define the ecological role of an organism are increasingly being used to determine and predict responses to environmental change. Functional trait analyses of butterflies remain underexplored compared with other taxa, such as plants. Previous works using butterfly functional traits have not comprehensively addressed issues about the quality of trait data sets used and the relative predictive power of different trait types. We compare the consistency of trait descriptions between six widely used...

This dataset consists of butterfly and bumblebee counts, winter bird counts, number of flowering units, and seed mass data, along with categories of soil type and quality, and temperature data. Data were collected from arable farms under the English Entry Level agri-environment Scheme (ELS) for two options: Nectar Flower Mixture option (NFM) and Wild Bird Seed Mixture (WBM). Surveys were carried out in 2007 and repeated in 2008. All data were collected using standardised protocols:...