What does the Water for Wildlife Project in Yorkshire do?
- We give advice to farmers, landowners and land managers on how they can manage, enhance and create habitat on their land to help water-related wildlife, including otters, water voles and great crested newts.
- We work closely with many organisations, including local authorities, the Environment Agency, English Nature, consultants and developers. We give advice and encourage them to consider water voles, otters, and other freshwater-related wildlife and their habitats in their work - in their policies and strategies, in individual site plans, and in their working practices.
- We carry out surveys and monitoring programmes of key species, to determine their current distribution, detect changes in their populations and distribution, and assess the quality of habitats available to them. We share the information from this work with those whose work may affect the species and their habitats, so that the wildlife can be taken fully into account.
- We ensure that wetland habitats and their species are included in local plans, policies and strategies; for example, Biodiversity Action Plans. Much of the work that we do contributes to putting these plans into action.
- Where we can, we involve wildlife trust members and other volunteers from local communities in our work, e.g. surveying and monitoring, or carrying out practical conservation work on wetland sites.
- The Project Officers also carry out some work outside the focus areas of their projects. This includes collating and verifying records for otter, water vole and other key species, and sharing this data with the biological records centres, the Environment Agency, English Nature, and other agencies. The information is made available to local authorities, consultancies, developers and landowners so that they can take the presence of these species into account in their work.
- The Project Officers also act as contacts for reports of dead otters and advise highways authorities on the measures they can take where an otter has been killed on a road, to try to prevent further deaths.