Project Sponsorship

A pine marten standing on a log, looking towards the camera

Pine marten © Mark Hamblin / 2020VISION

Project Sponsorship

Become a Project Sponsor

Do you or and your staff have a particular species or habitat you want to help us to protect?

If so, project sponsorship may be for you! By sponsoring a project, you can directly contribute to a cause that means something to you.  

From species recovery for the butterflies and beavers to protecting the all-important habitat they live in, we are constantly working on new projects to improve and reconnect Gloucestershire’s local natural landscape. Take a look at the current projects that need your help below.  

Species Recovery Projects 

 

White-clawed Crayfish

©Alex Mustard/2020VISION

Frome native Crayfish project

This project aims to improve the long-term survival chances of white-clawed crayfish in the River Frome catchment in Gloucestershire. Once widespread, the species has been decimated and is now limited to four small streams, and these last remaining populations are at significant risk of loss to crayfish plague. Without urgent action to increase the range, resilience, and viability of the remaining populations, the white-clawed crayfish of the River Frome catchment are facing extinction.
We plan to combine conservation translocations with natural flood management to restore these important ecosystem engineers to three of the River Frome’s main tributaries. Meaning this species creates, maintains and modifies a habitat, playing an important role in maintaining our watercourses and allowing other species to thrive.

Learn more about Crayfish

Adder - FoD

(c) Hugh Gregory PC2018

Recovering Adders on the Cotswold Escarpment

Adders are a native species in the UK and are a protected species, they are very rare in some regions and recent population declines have become a major conservation concern. This project will focus on enhancing existing adder populations. We will improve adder habitat on existing sites and between isolated populations to allow them to spread. With consideration for climate change we plan to make more protected slopes available to provide more humidity and feeding opportunities.
A mosaic of open basking areas and diverse vegetation cover will provide excellent refuge to limit predation on adders this improved habitat will also benefit a wide range of other grassland species.

Learn more about Adders

Landscape Projects 

Wetland - Billy Heaney

Wetland - Billy Heaney

Severn Solutions for Nature's Recovery

A nationally important project led by GWT in partnership with Hasfield Court Estate to showcase how the restoration of a naturally functioning floodplain can deliver nature-based solutions for climate change. The project aims to restore naturally functioning and climate-resilient habitats within the estate and will monitor and quantify carbon sequestration rates and greenhouse gas emissions in semi-natural habitats including a mosaic of floodplain habitats, wood pasture, traditional orchards and species rich grassland.

There are a number of baseline surveys which we need to find funding for to carry out habitat condition assessments and soil sample analysis to feed into the project.

- Drone for mapping (including hardware, mapping software and training) which can be used by a our other landscape scale projects such as
Eelscapes
- Soil eDNA analysis 

A wildflower meadow beneath a cloudy sky, with a row of trees in the distance. The meadow is filled with colourful flowers and green grasses. In the foreground are two tall, pink towers of common spotted orchid flowers. A black and white marbled white butterfly rests on one

Marbled white butterfly on a common spotted orchid in a wildflower meadow © Tom Marshall

Grassland Restoration at scale in the Cotswolds

This project will be working with landowners and farmers atscale across the Cotswold landscape to improve and restoregrassland habitat to connect these precious grassland habitatsthroughout the landscape.
The aim of the project is to create a significant and long-lasting area of species-rich grassland through a significant area of the Cotswolds National Landscape, to benefit wildlife and to integrate this within the productive farmed landscape.
The landscape is currently dominated by cereal production with the remaining areas made up of permanent grassland, although most is not species-rich. This project will aim to restore these areas and link them up, creating wildlife corridors. The scale of this project will allow invertebrate and pollinator populations to grow and become sustainable, and promotes carbon sequestration. Grasslands store about 1/3 of all carbon stored on land and remain resilient to climate change.

Community orchard

Treescapes

Treescapes is a landscape scale project working with two other wildlife trusts to create a network of enhanced tree cover from the River Wye up to the Wyre Forest.
In the midst of the ecological and climate emergencies, the Severn Treescapes project will demonstrate that increasing woodland connectivity at a regional scale, whether through woodlands, hedgerows, orchards and other tree systems, can work alongside agricultural systems.
We need funding to create and enhance traditional orchards as part of this project. Traditional orchards have declined in Gloucestershire by 75% in the last 50yrs. Of those that remain almost half are in a degraded condition.
Orchards have a wealth of benefits for both humans and wildlife listed below: 

- Creates a diverse habitat for a wide range of wildlife 
- Carbon sequestration combatting climate change 
- Improves the wellbeing of the local community 
- Helps slow the flow of water into the ground preventing flooding 

Find out more about Treescapes 

 

Community & Education Projects 

Jennie and a group of children bug hunting

Nick Turner

Roots for a Wilder Future

A focused in-school outdoor learning project to grow and embed connections between the natural world and Gloucestershire’s disadvantaged school communities. A legacy for the successful
‘Restoring Our Future’ project.
This would cover hiring a new role ‘Outdoor Learning Officer’ which would take over running our nature tots sessions, going into schools and providing demos, talks, and  workshops.
The reasoning behind this new role:

- Many teachers lack the confidence to take children outdoors
- We are the experts in our field enabling hands-on immersive outdoor experiences.
- Some children living in urban areas sometimes have low levels of nature connectedness. As well as the positive knowledge they are missing out on, their sense of self, well-being and happiness is impacted.
- The new post will allow us to increase and improve access for children, reducing the number of local children with limited or poor access to inspiring experiences in the natural world.
- WT is passionate about embedding an appreciation of the natural world from an early age.

Children running down the track at Greystones Farm

(c) Anne-Marie Randall

Crickley Learning Hut

Crickley Hill is a great site with a variety of habitats as well as the historic hill fort on site which make it perfect for school visits, particularly for schools in the east of the county. However, although we have great outdoor learning spaces defined, we currently struggle to deliver learning events and school sessions at our Crickley Hill site as there is no covered learning space and on a cold, rainy day this hampers enjoyment of the learning experience and restricts what we are able to offer.
Ideally we need an enclosed structure big enough to cater for at least 60 children and their staff team, giving a space for a learning session, lunch and a change of plan in inclement weather! We aim to build a wooden covered structure, ideally enclosed so that we can begin to welcome schools to Crickley Hill as part of our learning programme.

Want to learn more about our already funded projects? 

Find out more 

Contact

Our project sponsorship programme starts from £5000. Please get in touch to discuss your ideas, what we give in thanks to our project sponsors and we can let you know what has worked well for businesses similar to yours. Please contact our Fundraising team:

Email: fundraising@gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk

Corporate Relationships Policy

Please view our Corporate Relationships Policy here that applies to all businesses that support GWT.