GWCT News Blog

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.

The British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) is calling on the public to help fight a major threat to honey bees and other pollinators - Asian hornets.

Countryfile viewers were treated to a captivating glimpse into the world of nest monitoring during Sunday's episode.

In April 2023, the Lowland Gamebird research group finished a full year of walking 3km transect routes across a number of sites every three weeks, looking for fox scats and recording wildlife sightings.

As our recent blogs have suggested there is a role for rewilding within our landscape – in some areas this could include a withdrawal from commercial farming activities – and, given we are largely a society of private landownership, we respect everyone’s right to manage their land as they wish.

Recently a new study was published in Vet Record about badger culling and its relationship with the incidence of bovine tuberculosis (bTB). It was very quickly covered by the news and declared a “landmark study”, with the authors concluding that there is no detectable link between badger culling and any decline in incidence of bTB. However, Defra promptly issued a rebuttal and discounted the study as “methodologically flawed”.

The earth we live on is an intricately engineered, delicately balanced life-support system. Be it a worm, a tree, a mole, or a bee; a cloud, a teaspoon of soil, or the sea – almost anything in the environment that you can name (even the common wasp) is part of our life-support machine.