The Nature Park team is writing the first-ever research paper based on all of the data that’s been collected from school, nursery and college sites.

A big milestone has been reached with over 2,000 habitat maps now underway, and more than 500 of these being complete – an incredible achievement for all of the schools, nurseries and colleges involved. As a reminder, one of the first steps in the Nature Park programme is to create a map of the habitats you have on your site – to create a baseline so you can make decisions about changes you’d like to make and track these over time. These maps also gather a vast amount of new knowledge about habitats on education settings across the country.

What happens next?

The Nature Park Community Science team, is analysing the maps and writing an academic paper to share these findings with the global research community

  • It starts by identifying the habitats most commonly found on school grounds from the habitat maps and then uses findings from past research to estimate how much biodiversity those habitats are likely to hold.
  • From this all sorts of things can be looked at, from whether there are differences between habitats and biodiversity levels at primary and secondary schools to how the size of a site might impact the types of habitats and biodiversity.
  • Finally, the paper aims to identify which habitats contribute most strongly to biodiversity, highlighting opportunities for schools to support wildlife and contribute to nature recovery through the spaces you manage and use every day.

The Nature Park is a massive collaborative research programme, and publishing papers like this wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of every educational setting. As key collaborators in this research all of the schools, nurseries and colleges that have completed their habitats maps will be thanked in the acknowledgements section of the publication and linked to an online list of all settings whose habitat data were included.