News

Caring For God’s Acre, the conservation charity for burial grounds across the UK, is a group that MWN interacts with regularly as we try to find ways to collaborate in Molescroft Parish.

Churches have substantial land holdings, including graveyards, and MWN is working with multiple partners to help improve biodiversity in St Mary’s Graveyard. However these sites need to be treated with a great deal and care and consideration for those that are buried there, and those that visit. Mapping these sites therefore serves multiple purposes.

Join Caring for God’s Acre as they explore the importance of mapping these burial grounds in a webinar presented by Tim Viney from Atlantic Geomatics who will provide an overview of the Church of England National Burial Grounds Survey project and will discuss why we need good maps of burial grounds, how they are created and integrated with records, and how they are updated.

A number of news outlets have covered new legislation in Hull that would allow people to grow fruit, vegetables and pollinating plants on disused and unloved council land.

When allotments are scarce and councils don’t want to invest time in upkeep of shared spaced, there’s a real opportunity for community groups to step in and make a difference.

Choose your preferred news source: The Guardian or The Hull Daily Mail or the BBC.

Plantlife have released their “The State of Nature 2023” and is a stark call to action for our disappearing wild plants across the UK.
There are some stark headline figures associated with the report:

• 54% of flowering plants and
• 59% of mosses and liverworts

have declined in distribution across Great Britain since 1970. Also:

• 28% of fungi are threatened with extinction

Obviously this really should be seen as a call to action for immediate steps to halt the decline. Nature restoration projects have been demonstrated to help reverse this in local areas, something that MWN take to heart.

From community allotments to wildlife havens, guerilla gardeners are taking it upon themselves to create meaningful spaces

A fantastic article in the Guardian examining the impact of local groups on biodiversity by taking on unused and unloved patches of land. This piece certainly chimed with us!

The results of Butterfly Conservation’s Big Butterfly Count 2023 have been released, revealing a better picture for butterflies than had been feared.

Although the headline figures look good, with an increase from the previous years surveys this is offset against a declining general trend in butterfly numbers, with species dynamics changing in response to climate change.

Check out the full story on the results at Butterfly Conservation.

YWT has produced a handy, downloadable, PDF guide for their events page at: https://www.ywt.org.uk/our-events covering all YWT events from October 2023 throuh to March 2024. The downloadable guide can be found here.

Catch up with a free Yorkshire Rewilding Network webinar presented by Derek Gow.

Derek Gow is a farmer turned nature conservationist who is not only in the process of rewilding some of his 300 acre farm, but has played and continues to play a significant role in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole, and the white stork to England. A well-known author on such topics, and favourite of government agencies, he is currently working on a reintroduction project to re-establish the wildcat in England.

For information on this Yorkshire Wildlife Trust event please visit: https://www.ywt.org.uk/events/2023-10-15-autumn-teamwilder-empowerment-day

What is a #TeamWilder Empowerment Day?

Everyone is welcome. You don’t need to be signed up to #TeamWilder to join in!

These events are designed to inspire you to make a difference for wildlife at home and in your community!

Join our summer Empowerment Day to find out how you can become involved in #TeamWilder and play your part in creating a wilder Yorkshire.

By joining in, you’ll…

• Discover how communities across Yorkshire are coming together to take meaningful, positive action for nature near you.
• Learn new skills to make changes and put things into practice with presentations and practical workshops to build knowledge and confidence to take the action nature needs.
• Connect with like-minded people and have some fun together!

A wonderful community post from “Nature On Your Doorstep” RSPB blog on how to help wildife in your outside space this autumn:

Six rules are suggested:

1. Fill your space with plants (and if you can choose ones that are known to be wildlife-friendly, all the better) 
2. Add water 
3. Cherish dead plant matter – seedheads, sticks, logs, leaves, compost 
4. Offer supplementary food 
5. Offer supplementary nesting sites 
6. Don’t use pesticides 

With summertime drawing to a close, there’s still time to take part in the RHS ‘Check a Sweet Chestnut’ project.

RHS want to know where there are healthy and unhealthy sweet chestnuts across the UK so they can understand how far sweet chestnut blight and oriental chestnut gall wasp have spread since they were first reported. The information you provide will help us to produce an up-to-date map of healthy and unhealthy sweet chestnut trees and tell them whether their actions to control the spread of blight and gall wasp are working.

This year, between National Plant Health Week in May and National Tree Week in November, the RHS, Defra, APHA, Forest Research and Observatree invite you to submit data on sweet chestnut health to the UK tree health-reporting platform, TreeAlert.

Full details on the RHS Citizen Science page.