Over the last 100 years, the English countryside has seen a devastating loss. 97% of lowland wildflower meadows have disappeared and with it – vital habitat for pollinators.
To restore the landscape for rivers and pollinators, we are working with WWF and Airwick as the local delivery partners in the Soar catchment, stretching across vast parts of Leicestershire.
The project demonstrates that there is room for wildflower restoration almost everywhere. Work has been taking us into city centres, road verges, suburban pockets of nature, small towns and the East Midland’s rolling countryside.
For Trent Rivers Trust, working across the landscape creates a vital link between water and land. With almost everything happening on land impacting habitat availability and water quality, restoring wildflower meadows plays an important role in supporting resilient landscapes, which in turn support the recovery of rivers. Be it a reduction of flood risk by boosting percolation and slowing runoff, insect populations supporting freshwater species, or pollution reduction by settling out excess nutrients before they reach already overburdened rivers. Despite being your local rivers charity, much of our river recovery work requires boots, but not necessarily waders.
Our ambition is to support the partnership’s goal to create 20 million square feet of wildflower habitat. Between 2020 –2023, we are working with local partners to restore wildflower meadows.
This is our impact so far:
With thanks to all the landowners and land managers that have made this project possible by making more room for nature on their land!
Working on this project has been a true team effort and involved a range of partners. From wildflower strips on Halstead Hill Farm, to wildflowers meadows in a country park in the outskirts of Leicester, urban bee roads, a learning opportunity in Melton Mowbray’s Brooksby college, community group-planting efforts and enhancements in Leicestershire’s nature reserves – this project was powered by a vast range of partners.
This has meant that we have facilitated, liaised and supported a vast range of partners ranging from councils, local wildlife trusts, farmers and land managers. All bring a different set of expertise to the table and created optimal approaches for their circumstance.
Seeing the dots join, partners deliver their set of work has been a hugely rewarding part of this complex project, proving that if we want to go further for nature – we need to do it collaboratively.
Trent Rivers Trust and its 5 delivery partners have provided a much-needed boost for biodiversity of wildflowers and pollinating insects with >95 ha (>10 million sq. feet) of grassland and meadow habitat enhancement or creation at nearly 60 sites across the Soar catchment.
This marks a key contribution to the broader Airwick project aim to generate 20 million square feet of restoration and protection of wildflower meadow to boost populations of key pollinators across three areas, the midlands (led by Trent River Trust), East Anglia and the Welsh borders (Our Projects (airwick.co.uk).
Trent River Trust will deliver >14ha (1.5 million square feet) of grassland enhancement, with focus on planting in floodplain and riparian areas. This will have multiple positive effects on river corridor habitats across the Soar catchment. Enhanced grasslands and meadows will provide habitat for many important pollinating insects which in turn will help boost populations of birds, bats, amphibians and other animals. Healthy grassland meadows in the floodplain will sequester carbon, improve habitat connectivity with adjacent terrestrial and aquatic systems, and help to slow surface runoff, which in turn will reduce sediment and nutrient inputs into rivers.
This project has provided an excellent example of partner working to deliver a broadscale environmentally beneficial delivery program, through important collaborative initiatives such as the Soar Catchment Partnership. Through this project we have also been able to fund local conservation groups (e.g. Great Glen Community Wildspace), thus strengthening ties with local communities, and providing the means to fuel the inherent desire within local volunteers to work with and enhance their local natural environment.
The legacy of this project remains important to us and our partners and long-term preservation and maintenance strategies (10 years) are in place for all sites, to that the good work continues long after the project ends. Wildflower meadows take time to develop , meaning longevity really is key to successfully boosting wildflower and insect populations across the catchment an increasing resilience to future climate change. Trent Rivers Trust and its partners are committed to monitoring sites into the future to ensure sustained success.
Volunteer sessions, filming, education, promotion and publicity events have all been important in boosting the profile of this project, whilst regular botanical and ecological surveys have helped document wildflower and insect populations, both pre- and post-delivery, which will provide essential data to measure the long-term success of this project.
Plants adapted to low fertility conditions and low competition, and plants associated with cultivated land, have shown the greatest declines since the 1950s. This is primarily due to changes in agricultural practices (see Pressures and responses), including the conversion of semi-natural grasslands to arable, changes to grassland management (such as reseeding, fertilisation and more intensive grazing) and the drainage of wetland habitats. These species may also have been negatively impacted by air pollution. (from the State of Nature report). This has had detrimental impacts on insect populations across the country, including vital pollinators, highlighting the need for projects like this to act now and reverse the trend for a brighter future!
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