Eating biodiversity - ecology data, 2005-2007

The study is part of the NERC Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme. This project investigated the links between quality food production and biodiversity protection by asking the question: can production systems that use and maintain biodiverse natural grasslands, translate that into a source of additional product value in the production of meat and cheese and therefore benefit rural economies? The aim was to inverse the conventional understanding of landscape or environmental quality as the outcome of well managed farming to explore the idea of natural grassland biodiversity as an input into more sustainable farming and as an integral component of product quality. This dataset consists of the grassland botanical composition and chemical soil analyses resulting from this project. A botanical field survey of a number of sample grazing sites on selected case study farms records the plant species present within a representative area of phytosociologically homogeneous vegetation and the percentage cover that each species vertically projects onto the ground surface. Soil analyses of sample sites determines soil composition, pH and minerals. Land management, consumer opinion and nutritional data from this study are available at the UK Data Archive under study number 6159 (see online resources). Further documentation for this study may be found through the RELU Knowledge Portal and the project's ESRC funding award web page (see online resources).