Resources
There’s lots of support to help with nature recovery in your area.
Our Local Nature Recovery Tookit will be regularly updated to share best practice between our parishes.
There’s also many ways in which you can record what’s happening locally on a national level, for example recording ancient trees, river monitoring and the wildlife around you.
Local Nature Recovery Toolkit
This toolkit will help you to develop a nature action plan for your parish. It’ll guide you through how to map all that’s important; from hedgerows to rivers to veteran trees and make a plan to preserve and recover the nature where you live.
Seek and iNaturalist
If you’d like to learn more about nature in your area, we recommend the app called Seek (by iNaturalist). It’s a fun, privacy-focused and gamified app that provides live ID suggestions. Once you’ve got some experience and you’d like to record your observation for all to see, you can post it to the map on iNaturalist, an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.
UK Hab
The UK Habitat Classification (UKHab) is a free-to-use unified and comprehensive habitat classification system for all terrestrial, freshwater and coastal habitats in the UK. It’s intended to assist ecologists and land based operatives to describe habitats in a unified way.
BRERC
The Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre collects, manages and distributes biodiversity and geodiversity data for the West of England area. You can submit your own wildlife sightings for the BRERC region – the former county of Avon
Woodland Trust
Spotten an old tree? Make sure it’s protected by adding it to the Ancient Tree Inventory and help map the UK’s oldest and most precious trees.
Parish Online
A wealth of map datasets held by the council. From SSSIs to green belt to parish boundaries. Here you can browse some of the key map datasets, from ancient woodland to land registry to flooding.
WERN
The West of England Rural Network is looking for help with populating maps to help target funding for conservation efforts.
This includes existing areas of wildlife rich habitats (Core Nature Areas and Nature Areas), habitat suitability (a map showing which habitats would occur naturally across our landscapes due to soils, geology and landscape) and priority areas of action (Strategic Nature Areas).