2024

It has been a whirlwind of a placement year and I am grateful to have taken part in such fun research. The Uplands Team is fantastic, and I would recommend this placement, or job role, to anyone who has the opportunity to do it.

There has been much written in scientific journals about how conservation is influenced by changing values and beliefs, and the increasingly held view that animals and humans are equal sentient beings resulting in compassionate conservation approaches and ultimately calls for animal personhood. This results in concerns about the management of some species, such as when controlling predators or pests. But are these values and attitudes applied to all animals equally?

On 30th May GWCT Newsround reported on a think piece by Hong Jiang a PhD student at York University which asked how we achieve the expansion of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM) in line with the ambitions of COP15 and the new post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The GBF commits to 23 action-orientated targets by 2030.

Many parts of the English rolling landscape are criss-crossed by hedgerows, which if one stops and looks provide an interesting perspective on the history of the landscape being observed.