How Can You Help Improve Local Biodiversity?

The input from volunteers has been critical to the successful delivery of the BAP, by identifying ways in which people can become actively involved and enabling them to participate.

The principal way in which volunteers have been recruited has been through partnership working with the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers. In the early days, work with BTCV focused on farmland conservation such as hedgelaying but in 2002, a new direction was taken which now concentrates on community engagement based around AVDC owned sites. This has included the Riverside Walk and the Coppice in Aylesbury, Magpie Spinney in Winslow, and the Sandpit in Buckingham.

Training has been provided for volunteers to develop skills, such as biological surveying techniques. Through the North Bucks Bat Group which grew out of the Bat Conservation Scheme over 30 individuals have been trained to be Natural England licensed bat roost visitors. Similarly over 40 Great Crested Newt surveyors have been trained. Individual volunteers have assisted the team, by carrying out our bird and lower plant surveys at Buckingham Sandpit and tremendous support has been received from the County Recorder for plants in the Wildlife Sites Project..

The Graduate Volunteer Training Scheme was established in 2002 to support recently qualified ecologists in need of work experience. They have for instance organised the annual programme of Wildlife Sites surveys, set up a database for the Barn Owl Project and Great Crested Newt Project and entered hundreds of protected species records onto the GIS system to inform planning decisions, amongst many other projects.