Long Mead Farm and Local Wildlife Site
  Long Mead County Wildlife Site
  • Long Mead
    • The Farm
    • Our Habitats >
      • The hay meadow
      • The orchard >
        • Find the stories of the orchard trees
      • The river and reed bed
      • The fuel copse
    • Our plants
    • Collaborations
    • Long Mead Foundation
  • THAMES VALLEY WILDFLOWER MEADOW RESTORATION PROJECT
    • Meadow Restoration: step by step
  • Research
    • Soil Carbon
    • Invertebrate Diversity
    • Botanical Surveys
    • Wildlife surveys >
      • Enter records
      • Map of Records
  • Outreach
    • Care Farming
    • NATURE RECOVERY NETWORK
    • Schools >
      • Schools Nature Recovery Network
      • School Visits
      • Teacher's resources >
        • Long Mead and the National Curriculum
        • Long Mead and History >
          • Famous Eynsham Apple Growers
          • Water meadows in history
          • Long Mead and River Thames before Tudor times
          • Swinford Toll Bridge and highwaymen: Tom, Dick and Harry
          • The Thames at Long Mead in literature
          • Risk Assessment of Long Mead
          • The Countryside Code
    • Worshops/Training >
      • Meadow Restoration
      • Teachers Workshops
      • Hedge-laying
      • Community Meadows
      • Art and Science
    • Media Coverage

Nature recovery network

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​In 2019, we initiated The Nature Recovery Network (NRN). NRN is a network of individuals, community groups, local businesses, and councillors in Eynsham Parish and the surrounding parishes. It is dedicated to understanding, protecting, and restoring our local nature in all its diversity. This 'bottom-up' network aims at connecting enthusiasts with experts, busunesses and councillors all living in the same environment to enable a scaling-up of nature recovery in the face of climate change and ecological crises.

The guiding idea of the NRN is something like 'Charity begins at Home'. If we do our nature recovery by effectively 'volunteering' in our own gardens, or on our own doorsteps, and bring the experts and professionals to us, rather than vice versa, we can reap the rewards of our efforts every time we step outside our doors. When we see the positive results we might be encouraged to do even more – particularly if our neighbour is also doing it and we can chat over the fence about how the patch of wildflowers that we planted on the verge is flourishing, or whether the cuckoo that we recorded last year has returned. Currently, it seems to work the other way: if we take part in recording garden birds or butterflies or bees, our findings vanish into a national database and we are none-the-wiser about what frequents our own neighbourhood. The hope is that the NRN initiative will encourage us to rediscover what we already have, tell others about it, and find ways of working together to generate a mosaic of different habitats and so increase biodiversity in out own backyards.
The NRN initiates and supports projects which bring together local communities at the parish level to:
  • Generate community proposals for gains in habitats and biodiversity.
  • Collectively implement these proposals over time.
  • Facilitate community mapping of the biodiversity of the parish (water courses,hedgerows, veteran trees, woodland, species-rich verges etc.) to know what we have and to ensure that there are measurable outcomes of any interventions.
  • Use the data gathered to create a baseline from which to set targets and monitor recovery of habitats and wildlife over time.
  • Collate, store, analyse and disseminate data to create a local professional resource for the community, as well as feeding into e.g. the Thames Valley Environmental Records Centre, so that this knowledge base can be used to inform discussions of local developments and other planning issues, and for further research locally and nationally.



Contact; Catriona Bass                               

EMAIL LONGMEAD.COUNTYWILDLIFESITE@GMAIL.COM

LONG MEAD FOUNDATION (Charity number 1196294): Email longmeadfoundation@gmail.com
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