Authors: Ki, Tiffany; Smith, Victoria;Turner, Edgar;

Brownfield sites can harbour rich and rare biodiversity, but these sites are increasingly lost to redevelopment. Mitigation measures recreating ‘brownfield-like’ habitats are proposed, however there is little evidence evaluating their effectiveness. We outline a brownfield-like substrate aggregate mound habitat creation project, and describe the variation in environmental characteristics and plant and arthropod communities. Our results from the first two years of the creation show the potential of a small substrate aggregate mound to significantly alter the environmental characteristics of an area. In particular, the presence of the mound increased canopy openness, lowered vegetation height, increased inorganic material cover, lowered bare ground cover, and reduced temperature, as well as increasing species richness and altering plant and arthropod community composition. Most plant species at the site were found on the mound, the majority of these being self-colonised and over half of the species being early successional. We found that environmental conditions and plant and arthropod communities also varied between years and across the mound. Our findings provide strong evidence that substrate aggregate mounds can increase site heterogeneity and total species counts, as well as harbouring early successional communities, and might thereby be useful in mitigating the wider ongoing loss of brownfield sites.