Biodiversity principles and Roundtable Responsible Soy

Conversion and modification of habitat for increased soy production is already a major pressure on biodiversity, and is predicted to increase over the next decades, largely drive by the use of soy for feed for livestock.
I spotted a reference to the Roundtable Responsible Soy (RTRS) in a recent news item about Sustainable Soy and Food Waste Drive Progress in Netherlands: "Only soy meeting Roundtable Responsible Soy (RTRS) criteria is now being imported as part of the nation’s annual 300,000 tonne requirement, as of 1 January 2015, says the Dutch Dairy Association (NZO)."

The RTRS Standard for Responsible Soy Production is available as a pdf and contains several principles for sustainable practice. Here are the specific principles and practices that are relevant to biodiversity:

Key policy messages from EU CLAIM project

The CLAIM project aims to provide the knowledge base to support an effective CAP policy design in the direction of improved landscape management, particularly providing insights into the ability of landscape to contribute to the production of added value for society in rural areas.

Publication: nitrogen yield advantage from grass-legume mixtures

Nitrogen yield advantage from grass-legume mixtures is robust over a wide range of legume proportions and environmental conditions

Our latest publication from our international collaboration COST Action 852 is in Global Change Biology, lead by Matthias Suter of Agroscope in Switzerland. In it, Matthias used data on total nitrogen yield from 16 international sites to investigate whether four-species (two grasses, red clover, white clover) grass-legume mixtures can deliver more nitrogen in forage per unit area (it did). We also investigated whether this benefit was related to the % of clover in the sward - it was and it wasn't (!), but only because the benefit plateaued at a clover proportion of about 33% in the sward.  

AnimalChange project: report on grass-legume mixtures

Quantification of the effect of legume proportion in the sward on yield advantage and options to keep stable legume proportions (over climatic zones relevant for livestock production)

Our report as part of the AnimalChange project is availabe on the project website. 

KEY MESSAGE: Grassland systems using mixed grass-legume swards have higher productivity and less environmental impact than their respective monocultures. The positive effect of legumes on yield is most pronounced with a mixture legume proportion of 30-60%.

Publication: Plant species of conservation concern in Ireland

The distribution of vascular plant species of conservation concern in Ireland, and their coincidence with designated areas

This paper is now available as a pdf (until April 24 2015) at Journal for Nature Conservation.
It collates Irish (whole island) records (such as those collected by BSBI, and others) for species of conservation concern (such as Flora Protection Order species, Red Data Book species and others). We plot the distribution of plant species of conservation concern, and look at their coincidence with designated areas (Natura 2000, NHAs, ASSIs etc). As far as we're aware, this is the first time that this has been done in Ireland. Some counties are much better covered than others (see map below). This work showed that many of the records of species of greatest conservation concern occur within designated areas (average of 79%), but for individual species, this varied from 0% to 100%.