About the Nature Recovery Network

The Nature Recovery Network (NRN) is a network of individuals, community groups, local businesses, and councillors in Eynsham Parish and the surrounding parishes. It is dedicated to understanding, protecting, and restoring our local nature in all its diversity. This 'bottom-up' network aims at connecting enthusiasts with experts, businesses and councillors all living in the same environment to enable a scaling-up of nature recovery in the face of climate change and the ecological crises that have led to biodiversity loss.

Initiated by Long Mead WIldlife Site in August 2019, the guiding idea of the NRN is something like 'Charity begins at Home'. If we do our nature recovery by effectively 'volunteering' in our own gardens, or on our own doorsteps, and bring the experts and professionals to us, rather than vice versa, we can reap the rewards of our efforts every time we step outside our doors. When we see the positive results we might be encouraged to do even more – particularly if our neighbour is also doing it and we can chat over the fence about how the patch of wildflowers that we planted on the verge is flourishing, or whether the cuckoo that we heard last year has returned.

Currently, it seems to work the other way: if we take part in recording garden birds or butterflies or bees, our findings vanish into a national database and we are none-the-wiser about what frequents our own neighbourhood. The hope is that the NRN initiative will encourage us to rediscover what we already have, tell others about it, and find ways of working together to generate a mosaic of different habitats and so increase biodiversity in out own backyards.

The NRN initiates and supports projects which bring together local communities at the parish level to:

• Generate community proposals for gains in habitats and biodiversity.
• Collectively implement these proposals over time.
• Facilitate community mapping of the biodiversity of the parish (water courses,hedgerows, veteran trees, woodland, species-rich verges etc.) to know what we have and to ensure that there are measurable outcomes of any interventions.
• Use the data gathered to create a baseline from which to set targets and monitor recovery of habitats and wildlife over time.
• Collate, store, analyse and disseminate data to create a local professional resource for the community, as well as feeding into e.g. the Thames Valley Environmental Records Centre, so that this knowledge base can be used to inform discussions of local developments and other planning issues, and for further research locally and nationally.