Six years ago, I left full-time employment and started this blog to work out how I could have a greater impact for the nature that I love. For more on how I have resolved to do this see here – https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/about-this-blog/
In the last week or so, I have been networking with other local conservationists, discouraging anti-social behaviour on National Trust land, creating butterfly habitat, planting trees, getting a copse ready for bluebell season, walking 51km, leading a walk to look at local trees and reading local nature recovery strategies.
As well as a few days a year working for Cranfield University, I continue to volunteer for The RSPB, National Trust, Butterfly Conservation, Binfield Environment Group, Action Challenge and Bracknell Forest Council. In addition, I have a nice portfolio of projects covering swifts, surveying, local nature recovery strategies and biodiversity net gain. It feels like all of these projects either give me the opportunity to influence conservation on a greater scale or to encourage others to do so. I am particularly pleased to be actively involved with the creation of the Berkshire Local Nature Strategy and working with early adopters of the new Biodiversity Net Gain legislation. I am currently writing a series of blog-posts on the importance of data in the success of these initiatives (https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2024/03/12/kingfishers-and-alphabet-soup-part-2/).
I have finally given the full version of a talk about project management and conservation, which is based on my work over the last 10 years, and I now have the opportunity to give it a couple more times. This blog-post summarises my thinking on the topic and provides links to the posts that I wrote that helped me reach those conclusions – https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/project-managers-can-save-the-world/. Conservation project management is becoming increasingly important for many reasons including: delivering the recommendations in the UK Environment Act; demonstrating conservation benefits to funders; growing realisation of the lessons to be learned from conservation successes and failures (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/25/nature-conservation-scientific-evidence-save-species); and the establishment of specialist support for project managers in the sector (such as that offered by Wild Team – https://www.wildteam.org.uk/). These, and other, factors have led to increasing demand for project managers with conservation experience and vice versa. I know of at least one conservation project management role where two successive appointees turned out not to have the appropriate experience and the third attempt to recruit is struggling to find suitable candidates.
If you know a group that would benefit from a talk on project management and conservation then please put them in touch with me. If you want to search my archive of blog-posts for more on conservation, project management, or any other topic that I might have written about then this page provides categorised links – https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/claire/
I am still managing to find time to walk. The picture at the top was taken on the 51km walk mentioned earlier. I am preparing to try and walk round the Isle of Wight (https://www.ultrachallenge.com/isle-of-wight-challenge/). At 106km, this will be the longest continuous walk that I have ever attempted. Once I have got that out of my system, I will try and find the time to do some shorter walks with various friends.
I am hopeful that the next 12 months will see me doing even more for the nature that I love.
In Part 1 (https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2024/02/20/kingfishers-and-alphabet-soup/) I wrote about seeing kingfishers on a river where there aren’t supposed to be any and suggested that there are a set of issues with the way that species data is currently collected in England. In Part 2, I am going to explain why we need to resolve these issues now.
In the previous blog-post I listed some of the acronyms of organisations and projects that are collecting or using this data. I wonder if, like the spaghetti letters floating in tomato soup, these organisations and projects are all a bit disconnected. However, in England at least, plans are afoot to link things up better.
The UK government produced the 2021 Environment Act which, amongst other things, mandated the production of Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRSs) which will link national habitat and species priorities to the conservation work being carried out locally (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-nature-recovery-strategies/local-nature-recovery-strategies). In principle this should mean that resources can be prioritised in those places where the prospects for an important habitat or species can genuinely be improved. To do this we need to have accurate, complete and timely data on those habitats and species.
LNRSs will be written at county level, and these should set out the role that everyone delivering nature conservation in the county play in delivering national priorities. These strategies should provide context for local strategies and linkage between organisations delivering nature conservation projects. One group of organisations are the local authorities who will be delivering their own strategies, or action plans, which set out the specific local priorities. In my opinion, the county level strategies will major on habitats (unless a national priority species that is found in significant numbers in the county is not covered by those habitats) and the local authority-level stuff will focus on local priority habitats and local priority species.
The LNRS approach to maximising impact will be to map current habitat features and their importance and then to use an appropriate prioritisation mechanism work out where to spend limited resource in order to deliver more of those features (where a feature could be a habitat, a species or a set of species). My project management background tells me that those priorities should be determined by looking at a combination of: strategic importance; complexity / cost of improvement; urgency; and whether or not that priority would get delivered anyway.
To maximise impact locally, I believe that we need to measure habitat extent and quality. One set of tools for measuring habitat quality is the UK Government’s biodiversity net gain toolkit (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/understanding-biodiversity-net-gain). Biodiversity net gain (BNG) was another recommendation of the 2021 Environment Act and requires developers to deliver a minimum of 10% more biodiversity on completion of a development than was there before. The scheme went live on the 12th February 2024 in England for certain types of developments and is supported by a very impressive toolkit building on the knowledge of experts in both habitat and species conservation.
BNG encourages developers to deliver net gain on site but offers an offsetting mechanism where they can pay for work to be done nearby. Landowners, from farmers to conservation NGOs, are currently trying to work out how they might benefit from this potential income stream. As I write this, two types of organisation are looking most likely to profit from the introduction of biodiversity net gain in the short term: ecological consultants and lawyers.
The demand for baseline biodiversity surveys for both new development sites and potential off-setting sites is greater than the capability of landowners and local authorities and requires a detailed understanding of the BNG toolkit and relevant surveying methodologies. Hence, there are opportunities for ecological consultants.
Lawyers have a role to play in helping put in place the legal agreements to support initial biodiversity net gain off-setting arrangements. It is also likely that developers, who are finding their proposals held up by a Local Planning Authority (LPA), the subset of local authorities with planning responsibilities, trying to get up to speed on BNG, will call in the lawyers.
In addition to habitat assessments, the abundance of key species might be a proxy for habitat extent and quality. We need species data at this level because some species (e.g. swifts) are not covered by a priority habitat and the presence or abundance of other species (e.g. silver-studded blue butterflies) will tell us whether that habitat improvement is working.
So, BNG, LNRS and other related initiatives clearly provide a purpose for collecting habitat and species data. They also create a much needed sense of urgency. However, the need for better, more timely data is already stretching the capacity and capabilities of our processes and systems for recording, validating and consolidating species and habitat data. Much of the data that will be needed for baselining, and progress reviews, is gathered by networks of volunteers working for conservation organizations like the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) or Butterfly Conservation, or for local authorities.
In the final part of this series of blogs I will look at some of the issues that arise from this and outline some of the potential solutions.
Part 1 – the challenges with biodiversity data collection (in England)
As I walk across the bridge there’s a flash of blue as a kingfisher passes underneath me before settling in the lowest branch of a tree beyond the weir. It’s only mid-January and this is the second or third time this year that I’ve seen kingfishers on this stretch of river.
However, according to my local environmental records centre, there are no kingfishers on this river. At a recent meeting of environmental organisations it was suggested that the lack of kingfishers on the river is proof of its polluted state. But, there are kingfishers on the river, they have even bred nearby, so why are there no records and why is it important that the kingfishers are recorded?
The records centre data is consolidated from many sources and is used to inform planning decisions, inform local nature strategies and to target conservation actions. Some of this data is provided by local organisations. I am currently involved in a number of local projects that both provide data to our regional records centre and use that data. The organisations and projects involved are a real alphabet soup of acronyms, such as BFC, BAP, LNRS, BMS, BTO, GBS, BNG, etc. Many of these organisations and projects are trying to create up to date and accurate data for specific groups of species (taxa) that lets us make decisions in real-time about where to build, and how to mitigate the impact of development, as well as identifying trends and hence prioritising action and investment.
Some of the data consolidated by the record centre is provided by individuals. There are lots of people recording the nature that they see in my local area either through ad-hoc records (such as the iRecord app), through organised activities (such as the RSPB’s Big Garden BirdWatch) or through formalised approaches such as weekly, monthly or seasonal surveys carried out on behalf of a taxa-specific organisation (e.g. birds for the British Trust for Ornithology, butterflies for Butterfly Conservation, etc.) Some of this data finds its way to our regional record centre where it has to be checked before being published. At the moment this requires dedicated individuals to work their way through tens of thousands of individual records checking their validity.
Three things that I have learnt since I wrote these blog-posts are that: the importance of accurate and timely data is increasing; it is difficult to strike the right balance between what is done for free and what is charged for and hence what information is and isn’t freely available; and the role of technology in surveying and collating biodiversity data is changing. I am going to write briefly about each of these three areas and then revisit them in the second and third part of this series of blog-posts.
Despite their hard work, the data that our environmental record centre has is incomplete (although I have now added a couple of records for kingfishers in my area). Resource constraints mean that the team have to balance data quality versus data timeliness. With tens of thousands of records a year coming through from multiple sources, weeding out inaccurate records is time consuming. At the same time more organisations are asking for access to those records. For example, in addition to requesting information to help make planning decisions, local authorities are now trying to make sure that their biodiversity projects are based on the latest data.
The record centre needs to generate funds to cover its costs and does this by selling data to developers and their consultants, and to other interested organisations. Surveyors can access their own information, and to some degree non-commercial organisations can access data related to particular locations. In some parts of England the local environmental records centres have struggled to make this model work.
I have written before about the proliferation of software tools and especially apps to help the surveyor. More tools continue to be developed, often to support particular projects. In addition, new technologies such as remote sensing for data collection and the use of artificial intelligence for data interpretation are starting to show promise. However, the development, deployment and maintenance of these technological tools need to be paid for in some way.
The three areas that I have summarised above are inter-connected. Some of the organisations and projects that I included in my alphabet soup will require changes to the data, funding model and technology. I feel lucky to be playing a small role in helping make some of these changes for the benefit of nature. In the next blog-post I will look at a few of these organisations and projects.
Merry Christmas to all of our friends. Thank you to everyone who has already sent us seasonal wishes. As many of you know, we haven’t sent Christmas cards for a few years, and have instead donated an equivalent amount of money to charity.
This year we have chosen to make a donation to Heal Rewilding (https://www.healrewilding.org.uk/). Heal are England’s national rewilding charity (as opposed to places like Knepp and Wild Ken Hill that are working in one location). In December 2022 they bought their first site in Somerset and have been busy understanding what nature is already there and starting to restore some of the natural processes that will encourage more biodiversity. They are now looking for a second site in the North of England. If you want to know more about re-wilding have a look at this blog-post that I wrote in 2022 – https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2022/07/27/re-wilding-what-does-it-mean/. If you want to know more about how we decide where to donate money then have a look at this blog-post I wrote in 2021 – https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/investing-for-nature-revisited/. So far, the conclusions in that blog-post seem to have stood the test of time.
I have been following this charity for a couple of years and have done a couple of small pieces of volunteering for them. I always believed that they had some impressive backers but I decided to wait until they had started work on their first site before making a donation. I am convinced that the best way to address the UK’s biodiversity crisis is to influence the management of significant areas of land. Evidence has started to emerge that re-wilding sites, like Heal Somerset, act as a source of biodiversity for neighbouring land. Scientists working with the team at Knepp have shown how dung beetles and plants from their land are actually benefiting the health of livestock on their neighbour’s farms.
We are now looking forward to visiting the site in Somerset
Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2024, Mike and Jane
Next year we will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of a hedgerow in our village. It was planted by our local environment group and local scout group with the support of our parish council and the landowner. The hedgerow is cut back by machinery every three years and the latest brutal cut inspired us to survey the hedgerow to see what harm had been done and what if anything we could do to make it even better for its twentieth birthday.
I previously wrote about hedgerows almost two years ago (https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2022/02/24/hedgerows-on-my-mind/) and concluded with advice from the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. One of the things that they recommend was that hedgerows are trimmed every three years or so. Our hedgerow is cut every two to three years with a mechanical flail which always leaves it looking in a sorry state.
The hedgerow runs for a hundred metres between a footpath and an area of pasture and has to be managed to stop it encroaching on that path. Other issues that impact the management of the hedge are limited access, a listed wall, and agreements with nearby homeowners. The hedge was planted on private land, with the landowner’s permission. They have subsequently put up a barbed wire fence between the hedge and the path, which means that the local council’s contractors can only cut it from one side.
When I started to research this blog I assumed that it would be better for the health of the hedgerow, and the wildlife that relies on it, for the hedge to be laid or to be cut in sections. As these options were likely to be prohibitively expensive for the council, the local environment group offered to lay the hedge. To do this would require removal of the barbed wire fence. We have not been able to get permission to do this, so regular flailings continue to take place.
In half a day, two or three years of growth is turned into chippings leaving an unsightly mess and depriving birds, mammals and insects of the fruit that would have helped them survive the winter. Over the long term, this management approach can create a hedge that is dominated by those species that can cope with this brutal approach (e.g. blackthorn and hawthorn).
However, by August 2023, the hedgerow looked like this. As looks can be deceptive, we decided to conduct a survey to find out what state the hedgerow was really in. We used the PTES hedgerow survey (https://hedgerowsurvey.ptes.org/the-great-british-hedgerow-survey) and the hedgerow condition survey from the UK Government’s biodiversity net gain toolkit (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/biodiversity-metric-calculate-the-biodiversity-net-gain-of-a-project-or-development – follow the link to the latest version of the toolkit, download the calculation spreadsheet and locate the hedgerow specific tab). We were surprised to discover that the hedgerow was in good condition and that a few species of trees had appeared that were not in the original planting list for the hedge.
Both survey tools make recommendations about the future management of hedgerows depending on the survey results, and in both cases the recommendation was that no intervention was required at this time. The biodiversity net gain toolkit survey did imply that the hedgerow could have even greater biodiversity value if some of the trees were left uncut at the next flailing so that the hedgerow could develop into a “native hedgerow with trees”.
One thing that we did notice was that brambles on the eastern side of the southern / uphill end of the hedge were starting to grow up to, and shade out, the hedge itself. Ideally, these should be cut back but the landowner’s permission would be needed to do this.
In my previous blog-post about hedges, I quoted advice from PTES, which ended with “… When cutting is required, cut the hedges at the end of winter enabling the hedge to be a larder for wildlife over the long winter months. …” ). I have subsequently read slightly different advice from the Woodland Trust that says trim hedges on a two to three year rotation targeting different sections each year, create a diversity of hedgerow structures with buffer strips, trees and come coppicing (especially elm). Although this makes some sense, it is only applicable where you own the hedge and are managing it for its own sake rather than another purpose such as keeping livestock in or trespassers out. My conclusion is that flailing isn’t as bad as I thought. However, it would be even better if a few trees are allowed to grow, gaps are filled and cuts are done after the worst of winter is over. I am going to switch my attention, with the help of the local environment group, to other hedges in the areas that need more care. However, I’d still like to throw a birthday party of some sort for this hedge.
I am lucky to be able to walk from my front door to at least half a dozen newish green-spaces. They have all been delivered by developers to compensate for the impact of new houses. All of these green-spaces give the public access to land that was previously private. For a conservationist, they also offer a range of different habitat types and related wildlife. However, I am increasingly worried about the poor state of some of them.
Two of these green-spaces are being neglected while the local council and the developers argue about planning obligations. These disagreements, which have been going on for several years, are exacerbating the two sets of problems with all of these green-spaces and the developments that they are associated with: developers failing to deliver all of the environmental features that they promise; and inadequate plans for looking after those features that they do deliver.
Features that developers have promised but failed to deliver in our area include useable allotments, bird and bat boxes, and protection for existing trees and key species such as badgers. Part of the problem here is that development plans evolve and subcontract arrangements change as the planning application progresses. As a result, developers often have a legitimate excuse that it is unclear what obligations they are actually supposed to be delivering. As I am currently finding, developers are unlikely to add a swift box or a hedgehog hole after a house has been sold, and the relevant planning authority is unlikely to do anything about these omissions when they believe that there are bigger problems to be resolved.
Features that have subsequently been neglected include paths, trees, wildflower meadows, water courses and ponds. All of these require some form of intervention after their initial creation. The next few paragraphs will look at the consequences of neglect in more detail.
Paths are not being maintained. In at least one case the surface of the path is becoming increasingly uneven and hence is a trip hazard. In another, overgrowing bushes are forcing users close to a bank and pond. The lack of path maintenance also results in people creating new paths (“desire lines”) by taking the route they want because of the lack of a clear path.
In one development near me thousands of pounds worth of trees have died because of a lack of water. In one line of trees, planted to screen houses from a nearby path, all but one have died. The developers recoup the cost of these trees through the prices they charge homebuyers, so it is the homeowners that are losing out. New trees need to be watered during dry spells until they are established. Developers like to plant “standards”, trees that are already several years old and more than a metre tall, as they have an instant visual impact. However, standards need even more watering than younger trees to get them established. All new trees can also be helped by reducing competition from other plants by clearing and mulching around the tree.
Many new trees and shrubs are planted with plastic guards to protect them from rabbits and deer while they get established. These guards should be removed after a couple of years and before they restrict the growth of the trees. Unfortunately, in areas where a significant number of trees have died, the plastic guards become litter and even get carried around and dumped elsewhere by dogs and children.
In both of the areas that I am most worried about, the developers created wildflower meadows. In the first summer the flowers were fantastic, subsequently they have not been so spectacular. Our native wildflowers have evolved to prefer less fertile soil and the management regime practiced for centuries in the UK’s hay-meadows. The best practice for managing them is to cut the meadow once after the flowers have gone and seeds have set. The hay should then be left for a couple of weeks before being removed. This step allows seeds to drop onto the soil whilst removing the other parts of the plants which would enrich the soil. If hay meadows are not managed in this way, they eventually become less diverse in terms of flora and hence fauna.
Water-courses and ponds need to be cleared regularly, especially where dry conditions have allowed trees and shrubs to encroach. Failure to do this can result in ponds drying out or even flooding as water is unable to get past the shrubs and the litter that collects around those plants.
In England, we are waiting for the introduction of a new form of environmental mitigation called biodiversity net gain. Under this legislation, developers and local authorities will work together to ensure that new developments have environmental improvements that deliver sustainable biodiversity gains. These plans must demonstrate how new green features will be managed for at least the next 30 years. Although this sounds like progress and is underpinned by a really impressive set of tools built on sound science, I predict that it will become another area of dispute between developers and planners.
I do believe that there are a number of things that we can we all do to help minimise the problems that I set out above and hence to ensure that our green-spaces are better for nature and better for those who want to enjoy that nature. Potential actions include: sponsoring a space, adopting a tree, lobbying your elected representatives, and demanding better from developers.
The green-spaces that I am worried about have lots of regular users and are adjacent to new houses with management associations. A group of people could sponsor each green-space, perhaps in the form of a “friends of” group, and work with the people who manage that space to make sure that it is managed well. The group could even undertake tasks of their own to improve that space.
If you live in a new housing development or near an area where new trees have been planted then please consider adopting one of these trees and making sure that it is watered during dry spells until it is established. There is advice and a great set of resources here – https://www.trees.org.uk/Help-Advice/Watering-Young-Trees
Our local councillors are accountable for the state of any green-spaces managed by their council. They should also be aware of the state of any green-spaces that are likely to become the responsibility of their council. Managing green-spaces is surprisingly complex and we can’t expect our councillors, who are volunteers, to understand all of this complexity. Please take any opportunity that you have to help your local councillors understand these issues.
If you are the owner of a new home or are thinking about buying one, then there are a number of questions that you should be asking the developers, such as:
Does my new house have a hedgehog hole and a swift box (or similar)?
How are the trees and green-spaces going to be managed?
Have native plants been used in hedges, copses, etc and how are they going to be managed?
If we all take one or more of the actions mentioned above then our green-spaces will be nicer places for us to enjoy and they will be better for nature. We can also help make sure that promises made during development are kept and less time and money is wasted by planting things and then neglecting them.
Ten years ago I played a very small role in the launch of the first State of Nature report. Since then, the partnership behind it has grown and on 27th September 2023 the fourth report was published (https://stateofnature.org.uk/). There are now more than 60 organisations contributing to this authoritative summary of the state of the UK’s nature. Unfortunately, the headlines are that the UK’s biodiversity continues to decline.
In the original version of this blog, I posed some questions: what can I do to make a difference; and given that everything we care about is dependent on a healthy ecosystem, why is the launch of this report not headline news and what can I do to change that? In this version, I am going to try and answer them building on the responses I have heard from others to these and related questions. Whatever I write could not possibly better what author Raynor Winn wrote in a social media post reflecting on the news about the Sycamore Gap tree:
“So, the beautiful, iconic tree that stood in Sycamore Gap for two hundred years, sheltering animals, humans, insects and birds beneath its growing canopy, is gone – destroyed overnight by an act that’s described as environmental vandalism.
But it’s much more than that – in a week that has seen permission for the opening of a new oil field in the North Sea and the publishing of the State of Nature report – the chain-sawing down of this natural icon is a metaphor for our approach to the environment – wonton destruction without thought for the past or the future. I’ve sheltered from the sun beneath its branches, slept safely in its protection under a star-filled sky and I, like so many, am devastated by the news of the loss of the sycamore, as we are about the state of the climate.
But what do we do, how do we react, how do we take these emotions forward? Feelings of sadness, despair and anger have filled my head this afternoon, but now as darkness has fallen, I know these emotions won’t change anything. But if we take the tree as a symbol – a symbol of hope and unity – and we stand together, then we can make change happen. For every tree cut down, we plant a thousand in its place, for every child or adult who doesn’t understand how precious the land is, educate them, for every politician who doesn’t protect the future of this earth, replace them with ones who will. We can do this. We can do this if we’re united, together – a forest is more powerful than a lone tree.”
I remain convinced that the answer to my first question “what can I do to make a difference?” is to do something positive no matter how insignificant it might appear. I will be looking for more tree-planting opportunities as well as ways to support organisations like the National Trust and the Woodland Trust. There are other ideas here – https://www.rspb.org.uk/get-involved/campaigning/action-for-nature-toolkit/. We all need to recognise and celebrate the fact that there are millions of other people who want to make a difference too and that those millions of small actions added together will have a big impact.
A number of people responded to my initial post reminding me that the other thing that we can all do to make a difference is to make sure that our politicians are acting on our behalf. A few years ago, I wrote – https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2018/11/26/can-my-mp-help-me-save-nature/. My conclusion was that I would: “… be more selective about the national campaigns that I support, favouring those where charities are working together; be more active in relevant local campaigns, especially where there is an opportunity to engage my MP; and engage with a small number of campaigns that change the dynamic between MPs and their constituents with respect to nature conservation. …” I still think these conclusions are right and I am looking forward to the opportunity to engage with the next MP for my constituency. I will return to this theme in the first of a series of blog-posts on making a difference coming soon.
In my initial post I also asked why the launch of the State of Nature report was not headline news and what we could do about that. Even without the appendices, the report is almost two hundred pages long. It is full of some stunning pictures, but it is also full of graphs, statistics and technical information. It is not easy to navigate your way through the document, especially as any reader is probably only going to be interested in the twenty pages or so that correspond to their particular area of expertise. Some summaries have been produced, such as this one – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66923930. However, they tend to focus on the bad news, which is probably going to put off the general reader.
In hindsight, I think I asked the wrong question. The State of Nature report is a technical document aimed at particular specialist audiences. Any attempts to summarise it will lose some of the nuance. Hence, it is not going to be headline news. The report does identify many positive trends and gives plenty of examples of projects that are already delivering conservation outcomes in all of the countries of the UK and in the UK Overseas Territories. Perhaps the message for the general audience is “The main causes of these declines are clear; as are many ways in which we can reduce impacts and help struggling species.” For our politicians, the message should be to demonstrate the willingness and provide the resources to scale up the successful projects. The UK Government’s 2021 Environment Act contains would appear to support this, but the current government is distracted by other issues and many people believe that they are not serious about reversing the decline in the UK’s nature.
For all of us, the report does contain a set of hopeful pointers for the future:
Improving species status – “Halting and reversing biodiversity decline is vital, but it is only the first step towards a healthy environment with resilient species populations, thriving habitats and functioning ecosystems.”
Increasing nature-friendly farming, forestry and fisheries – “The UK Fisheries Act 2020 has come into law, which aims to use our marine resources sustainably and protect ecosystem services. The best available information suggests that nature-friendly farming needs to be implemented at a much wider scale to halt the decline in farmland nature.”
Expanding and managing protected areas – “Work is ongoing (at different stages in different parts of the UK) to implement fisheries management across MPAs and to designate new protected areas, including Highly Protected Marine Areas. The UK governments’ drive to reach the ’30 by 30’ target will see new areas designated for nature and people. Critically, as well as providing more space for nature these will need to be less pressured and meet the other Lawton principles of sites that are bigger, better and more connected.”
Increased ecosystem restoration – “The rate of ecosystem restoration must increase to meet the agreed nature and climate targets, although the full benefits of some restoration projects may not be realised for decades or centuries. Restoration projects co-developed locally are likely to lead to better outcomes for both people and the environment.”
Co-ordinating our response – “Land-use scenarios suggest that wildlife is likely to benefit from maximising nature-based solutions to achieving net-zero in the land sector, but that there will be trade-offs with current food production priorities and other land-uses.”
One of the things that I can do is focus my attention on the parts of the report that are relevant to the work that I am involved with and to learn from, and share the lessons from, the projects that are demonstrating success in those areas. We can all promote the report and encourage our elected representatives to pay attention to it, perhaps by supporting this campaign – https://action.wildlifetrusts.org/page/130179/petition/1.
We can all be the forest that Raynor Winn and Robert Macfarlane talk about by learning from others how to do something good in our own lives and localities and joining and celebrating the millions of other people doing the same.
Last week I walked more than 66 miles or 118,000 steps. I also: cleared a section of bridleway; surveyed footpaths; prepared and led a walk; did a circular walk in the Chilterns that I hadn’t done before; surveyed butterflies and coordinated surveyors; chatted about river conservation; drafted a project proposal on purposeful surveying; started the process of saving a couple of local trees from developers; tested some wet weather hiking gear; revised a tree trail; discussed a landscape scale conservation programme and the role that biodiversity net gain will play in it; and learnt about the downside of wasp traps. It certainly felt like a week doing the things that I want to be doing!
Doing these things gave me the chance to walk through wildflower meadows, surprisingly dense woodland, open heathland, and unloved scrubby corners of my local area. I saw lizards, deer, locally rare birds and hundreds of butterflies. I also saw plenty of evidence of landowners trying to do good things for nature from Chiltern farmers to conservation organisations.
These activities made me wonder why some places seem better for nature than other apparently identical places. The RSPB has taken on the management of an area of land close to the Surrey / Berkshire border. This place is popular with local dog-walkers, cyclists etc and yet seems to be more of a haven for wildlife than other nearby heath-land. A group of us have been surveying birds, butterflies and how the public use the site. We now have nicknames for parts of the site that reflect the species that we often see there and nowhere else. For example, there is one short section of well used grassy path where we almost always see small heath butterflies (in their season) but we don’t find them on other areas of similar grassy path.
I am learning that butterflies are fussy things. Often the larvae (caterpillars) require a different set of foodstuffs from the adult. For example, the caterpillars of small coppers, one of my favourite butterflies, feed only on dock or sorrel plants. The butterflies feed on a range of flowering plants including daisy, buttercup, ragwort, fleabane and thistles. So, a healthy population of small coppers needs plants from both of these groups. A good population of small coppers would indicate a healthy grassland or heath-land habitat probably with some grazing. Meanwhile the caterpillars of silver-washed fritillaries, one of the UK’s more spectacular butterflies, only feed on dog violet. Silver-washed fritillary butterflies feed on brambles, thistles, knapweed, water mint etc. So, a healthy population of silver-washed fritillaries indicates a woodland habitat with open rides, damp patches and scrubby edges. It would also suggest that the woodland is not dominated by bracken or over-grazed by deer.
If an area is supporting a wide range of butterfly species then it is probably made up of many different habitats. Butterflies seem to be a relatively good indicator of biodiversity and are relatively easy to spot and identify.
Two themes that link a lot of the activities that I undertook last week are: finding out how we can have a positive impact on the nature around us; and enabling more people to enjoy that nature. Biodiversity surveying clearly has an important role to play in both of these. This time last year I wrote the second of two blogs on surveying nature (https://ecoworrier133969581.wordpress.com/2022/08/20/surveying-nature-2/) and concluded “… you need to be clear what you want to get out of surveying and recognise that this may change over time. The clarity of purpose will determine what type of survey is most appropriate: a generalist survey; a simple specialist survey; or a more scientific specialist surveys (e.g. based on transects). The purpose and the survey type will in turn help you decided what data you need and what you are going to do with it. This in turn will help you decide what tools to use, including what apps.
There are a few themes that I came across while researching these two blog-posts that I’d like to return to in future: the unintended consequences of surveying; remote surveying and using surveying to engage people with nature. …”
Last week I walked with fellow surveyors, and other nature enthusiasts, and we shared some of what we have found and puzzled over some of the anomalies. We also compared notes on the feedback that we have been getting from the organisations that we survey for. One thing we noted was the lack of consistency, even between organisations of the same type, about what was required. For example, two neighbouring local authorities have very different requirements from their volunteer surveyors partly because they currently have very different approaches to conservation. I am hopeful that the consistency of what UK local government organisations are doing will improve as Local Nature Recovery Strategies are developed and as biodiversity net gain policies are implemented. However, I am less hopeful that this will happen quickly, and I am unsure that nature recovery strategies and biodiversity net gain plans are going to engage more people with nature.
Bird and butterfly surveys are providing data that can be engaging and as explained earlier there are some good story-telling opportunities related to butterflies. Butterfly Conservation has a robust survey methodology that is underpinned by good science and hence the data can be trusted. However, butterfly surveying is time consuming and is best undertaken by small groups of people.
It feels to me that the groups that I am surveying with need to take control of their surveys and do those things that are useful to the groups and their stakeholders and which can engage like-minded people. Writing this piece has reminded me that one way to make surveying engaging and fun is to ask questions and share them with others. For example, why are we finding small heaths on one path and not another, or why do we keep seeing and hearing a firecrest in one particular piece of evergreen woodland?
I have the opportunity to share some of these findings with a number of groups later in the year and I will take the opportunity to get more people engaged in enjoying local nature. I will be encouraging them to: open their eyes and ears; to be quizzical; to have fun; and to do some good.
I’ll come back to unintended consequences and remote surveying later.
Over the weekend of the 13th and 14th May, four of us took on the Jurassic Coast Challenge walking in memory of my father who died in January. The full route went from Corfe Castle to Bridport and passed many places that were important to my Dad including his childhood home and the church where he and Mum married. This blog-post is a brief summary of what we achieved. Two of us were fund-raising and if you want to donate then please visit https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/mike-coker3 or https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/joseph-harding2.
Judith, Mike, Gavin and Joe
At 8am Saturday we set off from Norden near Corfe Castle and having passed through the village climbed Ballard Down to head down to Swanage. From Swanage we followed the Priests Way to Worth Matravers passing the Square and Compass, one of the few pubs where I can remember drinking with my Dad.
Dad at the Square and Compass
From here we headed inland to Church Knowle to meet our fabulous support crew before climbing the Purbeck Ridge and following it to the coast at Arish Mell. Here we began the rollercoaster of climbs and descents taking us past Lulworth and on to Weymouth. By the time we got to Weymouth we had walked 58km and climbed 1670 metres (for context, Ben Nevis is only 1344m high!). Gavin, Joe and I reached the Weymouth rest-stop at 11.20 pm, and Judith got there at 2.13 am, in the company of friends old and new. After a hot meal, some foot-care, and encouragement from our support team, Gavin, Joe and I carried on into the dark. By the time we had walked through Weymouth, the exertions and heat of the day had taken its toll on Joe and he finished at the 66km rest-stop.
Gavin and I walked on through the night eventually reaching Bridport at 11.21 am on Sunday, but not before having to overcome more than 2km of pebbles, treacherous mud, a flooded road, and a diversion due to a cliff-fall that added one more steep climb to our total, giving 2430 metres (which is like climbing Ben Nevis and Snowdon in one go). There we were met by our support team and friends.
What do we do now?
To reach their finish lines, my team had to deal with blisters, chafing, swarms of flies, exhaustion and the temptation of some very alluring looking pubs. So far, we have raised more than £2000 for four different charities. It would be great to add a bit more to these totals so please give generously.
Dad loved this coast. He would have said we were mad trying to walk it in one go, whilst secretly thinking back to a time when he would have been capable of doing it. He would have enjoyed the sun, the wildlife and the atmosphere of the event. I’m not sure he would have been that impressed by the finish line fizz though!
Cheers Dad
Thank you to everyone who has supported us before and during the event, and to the Ultra Challenge team for putting on such a well run event. Special thanks to our support team and to our friends that joined us on route and at the finish. Thank you also to participants and event volunteers who asked about my Dad and who gave encouragement to our team when we needed it most. One of the great things about these events is how supportive and friendly everyone else is despite the pain that they are going through. It almost makes you forget about the problems of the wider world for a bit.
If you are involved with a large scale conservation project or you are thinking about investing your time or money in one then you should read this and ideally make sure whoever is sponsoring the project reads it too!
I have had a lot of help writing this and would like to give special thanks to Dave Hoccom, who has created and delivered successful conservation strategies for habitats and species. For anyone reading this who doesn’t know me, I have been managing projects and programmes in a range of industries for the last thirty years. I am a recognised expert in project and programme governance, and have worked mostly on conservation projects and programmes for the last decade.
In this blog-post, I’m going to tell you our conclusions first and then provide some links to earlier posts that will help you understand how we got there. This post was inspired by conversations that we have both had with a people establishing and running a number of re-wilding projects in Britain. Technically, a re-wilding project is a conservation programme that is process-driven rather than outcome-driven (https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/explore-rewilding/what-is-rewilding/defining-rewilding). As a programme is defined as a set of projects and other activities with a defined beginning and end, established to achieve a specific outcome, it might seem that re-wilding is not a programme. However, the challenge of delivering programmes without clear outcomes is something that the project management profession has been working on for the last couple of decades. By differentiating between complicated projects, where the team knows how to achieve the outcome but doing so involves a lot of steps, and complex projects where it’s not clear how to achieve the outcome or the outcome itself is not clear, different project management tools and techniques can be used. For example, Agile project management techniques have been developed to deliver projects with uncertain outcomes.
It is our contention that all conservation projects, including re-wilding projects need a sponsor. The sponsor should be an individual who advocates for the programme and represents it in conversations with senior stakeholders. This should not be the person who is responsible for the day to day running of the project – their job is to make things happen whereas the sponsor’s job is to make sure the project is doing the right things and to remove major obstacles for the project team. The sponsor needs to make sure that:
the change is well-defined;
the geographical scope is clear;
the team play the long game;
stories are told (loudly and often) about what has been achieved;
the impact of funders, and funding sources, are clear
To reach the above conclusions, I have made a set of assumptions: re-wilding projects are successfully delivering more biodiversity in the UK; more resources are flowing into re-wilding in the UK; and project management will ensure that these new re-wilding projects have a greater chance of success.
Taking each of the different things we expect from the sponsor in turn:
The change is well-defined
For an outcome to be well-defined there should be a specific articulation of what is to be achieved. Unlike an objective, it might not be possible to measure progress to the outcome, but it should be time-bound and achievable. For example, a well-defined outcome might be something like ‘in 10 years we will have 100 hectares of lowland sandy heath that is all of good conservation status and the populations of key species of flora and fauna will be increasing’.
If your conservation programme has a well-defined outcome then there are two important things to include in your programme plan for the sponsor to help achieve: find out who has achieved a similar outcome before and what you can learn from them; and work out how you are going to share what you learn with others trying to achieve similar outcomes.
For a change, i.e. a re-wilding programme, to be well-defined the programme should have a clear and compelling vision. The sponsor should help shape that vision and should then share it with stakeholders at every possible opportunity. As the team learns more about how to deliver that vision, an outcome might emerge.
The geographical scope is clear
One of the things that should define a re-wilding programme is its geographical scope. However, there will always be a temptation to expand the geographic scope as the programme progresses. The sponsor should make sure that any changes to the original geographical scope go through a robust approval process and that the programme team are able to maintain focus on what they have originally been asked to deliver. If a change of geographical scope is approved then the project team must be given appropriate additional resources to deliver the extended scope.
The team play the long game
It might take a long time to achieve the outcome, or deliver the vision, of your conservation programme. Some ecological outcomes may take tens or even hundreds of years to achieve. Hence, the project team should make sure that the right processes are in place to continue to monitor these outcomes long after the initial “doing” part of the project has finished. For the sponsor, this either means that they have to be prepared to continue to be accountable for the project for the long term or they need to have handed over the role of sponsor to someone who is prepared to do this.
One important thing to note is it is unlikely that an elected representative would ever be an appropriate sponsor for this type of project as they will probably be replaced long before the project delivers its outcome or vision.
Stories are told loudly and often
The project team should create a set of messages and a plan to communicate them. These activities should be carried out throughout the duration of the project and beyond. A lot has been written about the pros and cons of re-wilding projects. It is essential to address the needs of your project’s local stakeholders and to communicate the pros and address the cons that are relevant to your specific project. For example, one project that I have been involved with has faced vocal opposition from a small number of people who perceive that it is making an area scruffy. This is being addressed by clearly and consistently promoting the climate change and biodiversity benefits.
We would expect the sponsor to be the loudest advocate for the project, and to seek out and engage with those key stakeholders who oppose the project. The sponsor should also support the team to make sure that they do not lose sight of the key messages and that they receive recognition for the project’s achievements.
The impact of funding sources is clear
The people and organisations funding your conservation project will all have particular things that they want their money to achieve. The sponsor should work with the funders to understand their aims and have open and honest conversations about whether these aims are consistent with the outcome or vision of the project. The sponsor must have the confidence to say no to funders where this is not the case. The sponsor should also help the project team understand the impact that funding sources have on the geographic and temporal scope.
We are convinced that all forms of conservation project sit on a continuum running from simple, well-practiced, species recovery, to complex landscape-scale habitat recovery. Although re-wilding is defined as process-driven rather than outcome-driven, it is clear that landscape-scale conservation programmes can be either or a mixture of the two. Many current sources of conservation funding are dependent on the achievement of specific outcomes. We think that ultimately different forms of conservation projects are still going to achieve outcomes needed by nature and society, but the journey to those outcomes may be different. The advice that we have given above will help you know when you’ve arrived at your destination (and communicate that to your supporters and funders), and will give you the best chance of getting there successfully.
It isn't easy being green 