This Summer we announced big news for conservation and land management in Surrey – and potentially nationwide – thanks to a £1.2 million grant from The People’s Postcode Lottery Dream Fund. This will support a three-year Space4Nature programme that will use the latest satellite earth observation imagery and artificial intelligence to help us map and assess the quality and quantity of habitats across the county, enabling us to work on our own land, with other landowners and with public bodies to create, restore and connect fragmented habitat and support healthier, thrive biodiversity through more resilient populations of the wildlife of all kinds.
Alongside this hi-tech aspect of the project, we’ll be working with volunteers and community groups to carry out detailed checking of individual habitats that our mapping has indicated could be of interest, to establish which species are currently present and what modifications could be carried out to support nature.
This work, delivered in partnership with the University of Surrey, the Painshill Park Trust and Buglife, could not be more central to our vision for the Trust as a builder of physical connections between places, and collaborative connections between local organisations and people.
And it could not be more urgent. In Surrey, across the UK, and globally, wildlife is increasingly confined to fragments of habitat and unable to move across the countryside or green spaces. This has adverse effects on the diversity and abundance of wildlife and on access to nature and the benefits it brings for people everywhere. Yet while habitats shrink and become more fragmented, the need for wildlife to access a range of different habitats in order to adapt to fast-changing conditions is in fact increasing; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that 40 to 70% of species could go extinct if action is not taken to enable species to move through the landscape.