For the biggest city in Europe, London has quite a substantial biodiversity, playing host to an amazing range of wild animals, from parakeets to wallabies, as well as the regular local wildlife, that includes no less than 9 of the 13 native species of herpetofauna. There are also other species, some of which are not naturally found in Britain thriving in small pockets of land in London. With a lack of study and data on these communities, there is a new scheme put forward to help gain a wider awareness and understanding of the levels and habitats these amphibians and reptiles reside in.
ARC has teamed up with London Wildlife Trust, Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL - the Capital's Environmental Records Centre), London Amphibian and Reptile Group (LARG) and London, Essex & Hertfordshire Amphibian and Reptile Trust (LEHART) for this exciting new project, and with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, have begun 'Connecting London's Amphibian and Reptile Environments.'
Campaigning for wider public involvement, as well as educating the public on their local wildlife, the campaign aims to raise profile and understanding of herps and their distribution around the Capital. The project will be headed up by CLARE project officer Sophie Hinton, who aims for the project to become a success over the next 12 months.
The aims of the project are:
- to find out more about where London's amphibians and reptiles can be found
- to provide information that will help look after them into the future.
- to ask people to look for these animals and to tell us where they have seen them
- to provide an opportunity for people to see what they look like and to find out how best to look for them in the wild through a series of events
- to produce an atlas of distribution based on records and on predictive mapping/ modelling
- to provide specific training and advice to help staff and volunteers of the London Wildlife Trust, London Amphibian & Reptile Group and others, to promote amphibian and reptile conservation, especially on LWT Reserves and through LWT projects
- to provide more opportunities for people to see just how fascinating these little animals are!
"Amphibians and reptiles suffer from having a much lower public profile that some of our other native animal groups. With the CLARE Project, I want to achieve new heights for the public profile of herpetofauna by increasing awareness and understanding of them in the London region." - Sophie Hinton, ARC project officer
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