Latest site visit with Carbon Rewild and Joe Revans
Last week, Stefan and Richard from Carbon Rewild, and Joe Revans from University of the Arts London (UAL) joined us for a site visit at Maple Farm. They’re all thinking about different ways to improve our engagement with nature restoration projects and we’re excited to collaborate with them at Maple Farm to pilot their projects. All of the photos in this blog were taken by Joe so a huge thanks to him.
Carbon Rewild - Biodiversity Monitoring
As part of their social enterprise, Carbon Rewild, Stefan and Richard are developing simple biodiversity monitoring devices for people to use in their gardens and larger sites to establish which species are present all year around, not just during ecology surveys. Their collaboration with Maple Farm will help them develop a very simple guide for people to understand where to position the monitoring devices to capture the most wildlife. As shown by the images below, the devices they’re testing are acoustic monitoring devices for bats and birds and camera trap monitoring for small land-based mammals.
As a result of this site visit, Maple Farm is now set up with five devices in three different locations. In one months time, Stefan and Richard will come and collect the devices - we’re very excited to see what they find.
The devices used by Carbon Rewild from top to bottom: camera trap for monitoring small land-based mammals and acoustic monitoring device for capturing calls from birds and bats.
Stefan and Richard have already tested these devices in a woodland in Wales - see here for a brilliant blog on their findings, including an (admittedly unconfirmed) pine marten sighting.
Joe Revans - Nature Engagement
As part of his MA in Material Futures at UAL, Joe is looking to develop a new tool for public engagement with nature restoration projects and will use Maple Farm as his case study.
It is still very early days with the project, but he’s hoping to use geospatial data and a video game engine to create a virtual version of Maple Farm to explore how digital tools can offer new ways of interacting with wild spaces. These types of tools will hopefully allow people from outside the local area to experience the changes to the site who might not otherwise have had the chance.
For his first site visit, Joe came to take photographs of the site, some of which we’ve shown below!
In other News…
If you’re keen to spend more time in nature, especially during office hours, we’re a big fan of Autumnwatch’s live cameras, this year set up in four locations at Wild Ken Hill. Have the cameras in the corner of your screen while you work!
Get in touch
As always, please do get in touch if, like Stefan, Richard and Joe, you are interested in collaborating with Maple Farm on a project. Our email is 4youngwilders@gmail.com