In a nutshell...
Funding: Starting at £75,000
Length: ~1 year
Location: Blackdown Hills National Landscape
Aim: To unlock large-scale nature recovery across the National Landscape in a way that safeguards businesses and communities long-term.
*subject to additional management fees
The opportunity
There are almost no truly wild places left in the UK.
We have touched just about every corner of our green and pleasant land, and not always for the better – but Forestry England and the Blackdown Hills National Landscape team are out to change that.
As England’s largest land manager, we can restore nature at a landscape scale in a way that few others can. By putting nature at the forefront of the way we’ll be managing the land in these four wild areas, we’ll be trialling a bold, new approach to forestry.
We have a long and successful experience of working at a landscape scale to restore natural processes through our Wild Ennerdale partnership in the Lake District, which has run for 20 years.
Visitors to the wild areas will have a wilder, more immersive nature experience in a landscape where space is given for wildlife to move and thrive.
Specially selected as one of just four wild sites in the country, the Blackdown Hills Wild Neroche project (located at its northern edge) aims to create a richer, more vibrant and wilder sanctuary for nature.
Rather than focusing on specific habitat creation or enhancement, this project is about restoring and enhancing entire natural systems and processes. Landscape-scale ecological enhancement that encapsulates water systems, climate-resilient woodland, habitat havens for invertebrates, mosses, and liverworts, and thriving fungal communities that support biodiverse ecosystems.
It’s better for nature, and that’s better for us.
The project
The Wild Neroche project aims to collaborate with land managers across 7,000 hectares of the Blackdown Hills National Landscape to support shifts in practice that will achieve that long-term vision of a wilder, healthier, more resilient landscape for business and for biodiversity.
Over the next 2 years, a new Wild Neroche Land Management Advisor will catalyse, support and enable land management interventions using existing, as well as new, grant mechanisms that are only available to land managers in National Landscapes and National Parks.
Key outputs
- Improve function and integrity of the ecological network (radiating out from the Wild Core area) through land management interventions, thereby ‘unlocking’ 250 hectares of improved connectivity across the landscape in order to achieve better environmental management.
- By doing so, allow target/priority species to move more freely across the landscape to locate ‘potentially suitable habitat’ where they can successfully breed and feed.
- For example as well as creating ‘super highways’ for species to move, hedgerows and woodland can provide forage, shelter, function as a livestock barrier and enhance soil health.
Keen to hear more?
Reach out to the team today.