Opening my desktop, I am met with a smattering of shapes strewn across a map of Great Britain, which has been broken up into tiny fragments of different colours.

This scene forms the building blocks of our research: the shapes are solar farms, and the coloured fragments are parcels of land, representing everything from agriculture to woodland to cities and suburbs across the nation.

There are more than 1,000 solar farms across Great Britain and this number is growing as we shift from using traditional energy sources like coal, oil and gas to renewables. As a result, more land will be used for solar farms, and this can have impacts on local environments and wildlife.

Impacts depend on where the solar farm is, how it is designed and constructed and how space around the panels is managed.

One approach is to manage this space for wildlife and a popular choice is to create areas of flower-rich grassland (i.e. wildflower meadows).

We focused on three spatial scales:

• the solar farm itself
• bumblebee foraging zones surrounding the solar farm
• wider landscapes.

Considering both the inside and outside of the solar farm is important because bumblebees are mobile and how they use habitats depends on what else is nearby.

We wanted to understand more about this in the present day, and also in the year 2050, since solar farms have a lifespan of 25 – 40 years and bumblebee habitats in the surrounding landscape are likely to change in the future.

Whilst we don’t know specifically what these wider landscape changes may be, using different future scenarios can give us insights into the range of potential consequences.

We looked at the impact of solar farm management on bumblebees under three future scenarios, which ranged in levels of environmental sustainability.

These future scenarios were mapped by Brown et al. (2022).

We carefully prepared them for input into the poll4pop model, ensuring all habitat features relevant for bees were included.

Modelling using poll4pop showed that solar farm management was most important for influencing bumblebee numbers within solar farms, with twice as many bumblebees predicted within those with wildflower meadow margins compared to those without.

Outside the solar farm, the surrounding landscape had a bigger influence with higher bumblebee numbers predicted in the more environmentally sustainable futures.

This suggests that the future benefits of managing solar farms for bumblebees may be limited to the solar farm itself, but even so, these developments could help to protect localised bumblebee populations from wider changes happening outside the solar farms.