Project Sponsorship

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

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 

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 

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.