Written by Chris Panter, Footprint Ecology
Forestry England, the largest land manager in England, has recently launched its wild core areas, as part of its Forest Wilding Programme, to reinstate natural processes for the benefit of biodiversity (Creating wilder forests | Our new wild areas (youtube.com). To assist in this process, biodiversity audits are being conducted at some of the Forest Estate’s key sites. These audits will follow an established approach, which will go beyond simply cataloguing all the species present and will highlight all the rare species and their ecological needs, helping to identify potential interventions and steps to aid nature recovery.
The focus will be in four ‘Wild Core Areas’, which will cover at least 8000 hectares of England. These four Wild Core areas are located in Dorset, the Somerset/Devon border, Northumberland and Yorkshire.
Whilst the audit and assemblage process is not a new approach, this project is the largest and most comprehensive undertaken in the UK so far, covering a diverse range of geographic areas. We are excited to show how individual records can be combined and collectively used to underpin conservation and management decisions.
Over the next few weeks a team from Footprint Ecology and Manchester Metropolitan University, will be helping Forestry England, and contacting recording groups and records centres for relevant species records. The team looks forward to working with the NBN Trust and the data partners to help source species records to help in this important conservation project. We would welcome contact from groups and individuals that may be able to assist.
For more information about the auditing process, or if you think you can help provide species records in any of the Wild Core Areas please get in touch via email
