Dorothy Casey, Rob Fuller, John Baker, Juliet Hawkins, and Julian Roughton use examples from East Anglia to discuss the impacts of natural regeneration and the restoration and creation of ponds on the wildlife of arable land, and describe the resultant process of species colonisations at wilded sites.
Post-war agricultural intensification has led to widespread erosion of extent, complexity and diversity of wildlife habitat in Britain’s countryside. The result has been increased fragmentation and isolation of semi-natural habitat patches. Often combined with the loss of critical food resources, this has caused species declines across a range of taxa (e.g. Macdonald et al. 2015; Newton 2017).