By working with Conservation Evidence, an international initiative to share and embed evidence and research into conservation practice, the Trust will ensure that it both accesses and uses the latest data from around the world to guide and inform its day-to-day work. The Trust will also be feeding back evidence into the system from what it observes on its reserves, making sure that it has designed robust experiments which test the effectiveness of its management.
Surrey Wildlife Trust’s GIS, Research and Monitoring Manager Ben Siggery says:
“Conservation should always be based on science rather than anecdotes or tradition – but historically there’s been a problem with the dissemination of evidence from scientists and academics down to the practitioners on the ground. Too often the latest information is held up behind paywalls in academic journals or lost within a haze of inaccessible jargon.
“By making sure we have access to - and help inform - the strongest possible scientific evidence, this new partnership will enable us to manage our own reserves as effectively as possible and provide the very best advice to landowners and managers, businesses and the public across the county.”
Surrey Wildlife Trust has a strong commitment to strengthening its ties with the academic community. In particular, it publishes an annual research prospectus offering a breadth of research projects from different departments across the Trust for undergraduate and postgraduate students to undertake for their final year projects. This allows the Trust to provide ideas, stimuli and sites for the projects to be conducted on, helping academics deliver research that has strong and realistic conservation outputs.
Since first launching the research prospectus programme in 2020, over 15 students have completed projects with the Trust, ranging from examining landowner perspectives on rewilding to searching for rare beetles on the north downs. A further 15 students are working on ongoing projects.
More widely, The Wildlife Trusts are working to better facilitate the sharing of evidence, research, ideas, challenges and solutions across the academic and conservation communities and have set up a Community of Practice to help start conversations about this between Trusts. The Wildlife Trusts' head of science and research, Nigel Doar, explains more here.
