The Landscape Recovery project

Led by West Dorset Wilding, the Brit Valley Landscape Recovery Project is one of DEFRA’s long term, large-scale environmental land management schemes that supports nature restoration projects. Our part in this work has been to help the project team understand the current condition and baseline potential of the woodlands. Uniquely the partnership is concerned that though nature restoration is a focus, there should be no loss of productive potential in the landscape. A secondary goal of the project has been the engagement of project partners who may not otherwise be managing woodland and those who might be managing in isolation.

The project

West Dorset Wilding is a landowner and farmer-led charity taking action to restore ecosystems, and improve nature in West Dorset through rewilding and regenerative agriculture. The project brings together over 50 project partners covering 3,500 hectares of agricultural land. Within this area, 750 hectares are woodland, a significant proportion of which is unmanaged.

As part of producing a project-level woodland management plan, West Dorset Wilding needed to get a baseline of the current condition of these woodlands. An important goal of the project is also to ensure that the productivity of the woodlands is maintained alongside the recovery work that will take place, for which a baseline is also necessary.

Sites and surprises

We spent time visiting as many sites as we could under some fairly gruelling but beautiful midsummer heat; carrying out inventories and condition assessments at each site. We were struck not only by the diversity across the sites we visited, but also by the unexpected richness within them. What appeared uniform on a map revealed small pockets of high productivity and incredible biodiversity on the ground, along with passionate owners eager for advice on how to protect and strengthen the resilience of their woodlands.

Sites without current management plans were surveyed for condition and productive potential. While those with plans in place were analysed to give an understanding of existing objectives for land management. Along the way, we uncovered some classic misinterpretations about the role of woodland management. A recurring theme was that landowners without plans often saw woodland management as a “negative” intervention, and therefore assumed a management plan wasn’t necessary.

Beyond the project

Spending time in these diverse woodlands, talking with owners and walking the land has given us a real sense of the potential that lies within the Brit catchment, both for biodiversity and for people. The project feels like the beginning of a much bigger conversation about what these landscapes can become when management and restoration is considered on an interconnected landscape scale. Making the valley less fragmented, more resilient to climate pressures and an integrated part of the whole landscape.