What wildlife is living in your local patch – be that your garden, favourite nature reserve, local park, or whatever ‘your patch’ means to you? How is your patch contributing to the wider biodiversity of your area? What contribution could it potentially make? These are the kind of questions we would like to get people thinking about in the ‘Your Wild Patch’ project, which aims to both build natural history and recording skills in the community, and to help people to use those skills to record the wildlife on their local patch – or further afield! This project, running until March 2027, is funded by Welsh Government’s Local Places for Nature biodiversity grant scheme, via our region’s Local Nature Partnerships, who we are working closely with on the project.
Over the course of the project, we will be developing a system for people to adopt a patch to record, alongside resources to help them start to identify their local wildlife and understand how their patch contributes to the biodiversity of their area. To design these, we are working closely with various community and recording groups in our region, as well as local species experts and our partners working in conservation. These will augment the resources already gathered together on our Wildlife Recording Toolkit.
You can see examples of resources we have developed so far below. Get in touch if you want these for your own patch!
Resources
- 1km Square or Patch Recording Summary
The aim of these summaries is to give an overall impression of what we know about the area, stimulate interest in further recording, and highlight any gaps. They complement the existing ‘What’s in My Area’ function on Aderyn, where users can search for a non-sensitive species list for any 1km square – aderyn.lercwales.org.uk/public/search.
. - Starter species lists
These provide a list of 100 readily identifiable species, covering all the major species groups outlined in the recording summary, and also note when they were last recorded in the patch, if at all – according to records held by WWBIC. They are not proscriptive of what to record, but highlight accessible species to start looking for in your patch.
West Wales Wild Watch
As part of the project we are running regular West Wales Wild Watch sessions which will move around different communities of Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire. These sessions will provide opportunities to explore local habitats together, record the species we find and have fun looking at nature in relaxed, practical sessions. Training on recording and species identification will also be provided. Findings from sessions will be shared on West Wales Biological Recording | Facebook Page.
