Background
Following the Making Space for Nature report and the recent Natural Environment White Paper (The Natural Choice) and Biodiversity 2020 conservation strategy, there is an increasing recognition of the need for conservation of the natural environment to be planned and implemented at a large or ‘landscape’ scale. Existing wildlife sites remain vitally important, but will in many places need to be supplemented by conservation initiatives in the wider countryside, with conservation management designed to address multiple objectives over large areas, taking into account ecological processes and ecosystem services, and delivered through partnerships of multiple organisations and local communities and land managers.
Defra and Natural England, in partnership with Scottish Natural Heritage and Countryside Council for Wales (now Natural Resources Wales) commissioned a research project to explore and review existing large-scale conservation (LSC) in England, Scotland and Wales.
The project, which was carried out by the University of Southampton, the University of Cambridge and Natural England, had four broad goals:
- To build a good overview of LSC initiatives across Great Britain
- To explore the sources of information used to inform design and management of LSC and how this information has been applied
- To explore the social and institutional aspects of LSC (for example partnerships and management arrangements) and how these affect success in achieving conservation goals
- To investigate whether there have been greater environmental improvements in areas with more large-scale conservation being done
This website provides access to the database of LSC initiatives that was compiled as part of the project.
You can search for LSC initiatives by browsing the map, or by searching for words in the box to the left.
