Model output data from: Solar farms as potential future refuges for bumblebees

Solar farms offer an opportunity for habitat creation for wildlife,
including insect pollinators, potentially simultaneously contributing to
both low-carbon energy and nature recovery. However, it is unknown whether
co-benefits would persist under future land use change given that habitat
value is context dependent. For the 1,042 operational solar farms
in Great Britain, we predict their ability to support bumblebee
populations (both inside and outside the solar farm) under three different
socio-economic futures. These futures represent alternative 1 km scale
landcover projections for the year 2050 with accompanying narratives. We
downscale these to 10 m resolution, spatially allocating crop rotations,
agri-environment interventions, and other habitat features consistent with
the scenario narratives, to realistically represent fine-scale landscape
elements of relevance to bumblebee populations. We then input these
detailed maps into a sophisticated process-based model (poll4pop) that
simulates bumblebee foraging and population dynamics, enabling us to
predict bumblebee density in and around Great Britain’s solar farms,
accounting for the effects of their changed habitat context and
configuration in these different future scenarios. This dataset contains
raw poll4pop model outputs, including the number of bumblebee nests,
foraging bumblebees and new bumblebee queens inside each solar farm,
surrounding foraging zone (0-500 m from the solar farm boundary) and wider
landscape (10 km).