Futurescapes is RSPB’s contribution to delivering Landscape Scale Restoration and our work across Scotland shows that this approach of thinking on a big scale and working with a wide range of partners is helping us to achieve even more for birds and other wildlife than ever before.
Whether its at places like the Caledonian Forests and Flow Country where we have a long history of restoring habitats or places like the Inner Forth and Garnock Valley where RSPB does not have significant land holdings, this way of working is offering us some really exciting new opportunities to give nature a home within a wide variety of Scotland’s landscapes.
Caledonian Pine Forest, one of the RSPB's Futurescapes (credit: RSPB Images)
Of course, RSPB Scotland is not alone in taking forward this conservation approach and next week we are delighted to be running an event in partnership with Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and Forestry Commission Scotland that will allow a variety of organisations to share experiences and ideas on what can be achieved by using habitat restoration on a big scale to deliver benefits for both wildlife and the people living in those landscapes.
This Sharing Good Practice event will be hosted by SNH at Battleby and chaired by Simon Pepper, SNH Board member. A morning session will give us a chance to hear from four examples of projects already delivering on the ground. With talks on the Inner Forth Futurescape, Scottish Wildlife Trust’s (SWT) Cumbernauld Living Landscape, The Great Trossachs Forest and the Cairngorms National Park, we should hear a wide range of experiences and ideas from urban to rural landscapes and public to charity sector. I’m sure this will spark some good debate in the panel discussion that follows.
Smaller workshop groups in the afternoon should allow everyone a chance to contribute to the discussion and share practical ideas on successes, challenges and ways we can work collectively to integrating conservation into land management more widely than in nature reserves and protected areas. After all, this is the really big step change that is needed if we are to reverse the loss of biodiversity that was revealed by the State of Nature report earlier this year. Its a huge challenge but we hope that this type of event will go some way to helping us all rise to that challenge.
I’m delighted to say the event is now fully booked. For those of you attending, I look forward to seeing you there next Tuesday and we hope to post some feedback and thoughts from those attending here next week.