Blogs

Holding my breath, navigating clouds of pollen in rye fields - an expected state for an ecological researcher. But after yet another summer field season, I've uncovered the need for a myriad of skills beyond the obvious.

This October, the GWCT’s Head of Wildlife Recovery Dr Francis Buner, accompanied by placement student Jasmine Canham, was invited to give a keynote presentation on grey partridge conservation in Europe, on the occasion of the national launch event for a German-wide grey partridge recovery project called ‘Rebhuhn retten – Vielfalt fördern!’ (‘Save the grey partridge – Promote biodiversity!’).

We all have vested interests. Sometimes they can be a driver for good. There are some opportunities to be realised through adoption of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, but we need to accept that there are sacrifices too, and individuals vary in their willingness to embrace this for the greater good.

The GWCT is delighted that the headline of the EFRA report following its soil health inquiry is that government should take soil health as seriously as it does our other critical assets of water and air.

At its heart, FRAMEwork is about sharing ideas, inspiring new approaches, and collaborating to make farmland biodiversity conservation possible on the ground. This occurred in March when the GWCT team hosted the projects’ annual meeting.

When you think of the GWCT, images of pheasants, partridges, and maybe even lapwings come to mind. But there’s something we deeply care about that might surprise you: soil.

Politicising climate change is dangerous. There are numerous examples of how forcing complex environmental issues into binary choices doesn’t turn out well. Understanding the science, accepting the complexity, and acting on the best evidence available at the time is the only way out of the considerable challenges we currently face.

As the BEESPOKE project draws to a close, there are a number of crucial messages to take away. Pollinators, like many living creatures, need food, shelter and somewhere to nest. The need for floral diversity to provide pollinators with food sources that suit them is a key point around which the BEESPOKE project was largely based.

Chapter 6 of Farming with the Environment covers the aquatic side of things. Some of it is about how nutrients behave in water and how aquatic invertebrate communities are affected by them. But the fact is that what goes on in water is influenced massively by the management of the land draining into it.

Nationally and globally, the abundance and species diversity of wildlife has declined over the past decades. In Farming with the Environment, I describe the steps we have taken to reverse this decline through the development of practical evidence-based habitat creation and management.