Training at People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES)

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By Ian White, Dormouse & Training Officer, Grace Johnson, Hedgehog Officer for Hedgehog Street, Steve Oram, Orchard Biodiversity Officer and Megan Gimber, Key Habitats Project Officer, People’s Trust for Endangered Species

Of the plethora of endangered species in the UK, PTES has long championed the conservation of water voles, hedgehogs, hazel dormice and stag beetles. We're also doing much to inspire action to restore and protect traditional orchards and hedgerows. To support the monitoring, assessments and management of these species and habitats, we provide advice and training for our many volunteers to keep them up to date with the latest information, techniques and the results of all their considerable efforts.

Hazel dormice can be a challenging species to work with as they’re highly protected, but they’re a great indicator of high-quality woodland and hedgerow habitats. We train volunteers to survey for dormice and support them to obtain a licence, so they can monitor a dormouse population and contribute data to our National Dormouse Monitoring Programme which provides information on the state of Britain’s dormouse population. We also train ecological consultants to survey for dormice and know how to best protect them when a site is earmarked for development. And we talk to farmers, landowners and land managers on how best to manage their land to help dormice.

Our online Dormouse Ecology, Conservation and Woodland Management courses, usually run twice a year, are for people with an interest in dormice or who might wish to start training for their dormouse licence. For ecological consultants we run two, three-day courses in the autumn at our nature reserve on the Isle of Wight that involves more training in surveying for dormice and dormouse handling. These courses are popular and are often sold out a year in advance. We also run one-day courses on the island that look at both woodland and hedge management, and bespoke courses on any aspect of dormouse conservation, dormouse surveying and land management.

Through our hedgehog work and longstanding partnership with The British Hedgehog Preservation Society, PTES’ hedgehog conservation work ranges from public engagement, through to policy and training. Last year’s State of Britain’s Hedgehogs report found that while the decline in rural areas is ongoing, with losses of between 30%-75% in different areas since 2000, a more positive picture is emerging across our urban landscape. Following a historic fall in hedgehog numbers, survey data indicate that the decline is stabilising in our towns and cities, and even showing early signs of improvement. Our urban environment can offer diverse foraging and nesting habitat, with gardens, parks and greenspaces being key strongholds. Urban greenspace management is therefore an important element of our work. Our Hedgehog Ecology and Management for Practitioners (HEMP) course aims to improve habitat and tackle issues on the ground.

The course is widely attended by land managers, conservation volunteers, local wildlife groups, ecologists and more, with both virtual and in-person options. Private courses can also be organised for larger groups or organisations as required. The course content is split into three sessions, taking attendees through different areas of hedgehog ecology, conservation and land management. The first session offers an introduction to the species with an overview of hedgehog biology and ecology. The second outlines hedgehog population trends and status, as well as their legal protection and methods of monitoring. In the third session, introduces the various threats faced by hedgehogs, and encourages the participants to consider solutions before feeding back in in a group discussion.

Our work with key habitats such as traditional orchards includes interacting on a physical level with surveys, workshops, and events, but also digitally, using GIS mapping software. PTES mapped traditional orchard habitats using GIS, but we needed volunteers across the country to go to see them to confirm our findings. By the end of the initial mapping project around 21% of the inventory had been ground-truthed one way or another. Since then we’ve reached around 36% so there’s still plenty left to do, and we always welcome new surveyors. Volunteers are allocated an area, usually close to their own parish or region, and sent a map of orchards and potential orchards along with a training pack to help them identify fruit tree species, biodiversity features, and they are asked to look out for certain wildlife.

We’re sometimes asked for more specialist help by community groups or institutions such as schools to help with planning an orchard, grafting fruit trees, or managing a community orchard for wildlife, so we may visit these groups to give talks or run workshops. This gives us an opportunity to engage with the public and is a much more effective way of learning than just reading a book or a website.

The orchard inventory is continually being improved and updated with information from varied sources, including historical data, other projects, owner and volunteer surveys, and public sources generated from internet search alerts. All this data has to be integrated into the inventory somehow, most of which is done through the MapInfo and QGIS software packages. When this is too much work for our orchard team staff member, we commonly enlist outside help. We’ve often benefited from the help of students looking for training and work experience. With the recently increased viability of remote working this has become available to a far wider base, and over the last three years, from the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve run over a hundred online QGIS tutorials.

Another habitat we work to protect is possibly the most iconic in our countryside: hedgerows. The habitat they provide is vital to thousands of species. But hedge health impacts both their wildlife and environmental credentials, and how we manage hedges determines their health.

PTES runs various training courses to support our two hedgerow surveys; the Great British Hedgerow Survey aimed at wildlife volunteers, and Healthy Hedgerows created specifically for farmers and landowners. Both surveys provide instant feedback and management advice, helping to create and maintain healthier hedgerows, which ensures they continue to support the countless species that call them home.

To find out more about PTES’ training courses, or to sign up, visit www.ptes.org/events-and-training

 
Find out more about People’s Trust for Endangered Species here, or follow them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram

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