A major conservation effort is helping species across the New Forest thrive.

Bats, eels, reptiles, and dragonflies are just a few of the thousands of species benefiting from the £1.3 million species survival fund project, a two-year scheme aimed at reversing species decline and boosting habitat resilience in the New Forest National Park.

Led by the New Forest National Park Authority (NPA), the project brought together five partner organisations to restore and enhance habitats across 320 hectares at 31 sites.

A rare bird that was previously on the brink of extinction in the UK is making a comeback, surveys have shown.

The Dartford warbler suffered from a population crash in the 1960s, leaving only a few pairs in Dorset.

The latest national surveys have revealed a 44% increase in the species in the past five years, with 264 pairs counted in 2025.

Highland councillors have agreed to declare an area of shoreline on the Inner Moray Firth as a local nature reserve (LNR).

The almost 47 acres (19ha) at Ardersier Common provides habitat for birds such as tern, curlew and goldfinch and it is also home to rare species of flowers and butterflies.

An LNR is a protected area of land designated by a local authority because of its special natural interest or educational value.

The creation of a third new national forest has taken an exciting step forward today (Tuesday 26 May), with the government committing up to £7.5 million over a five-year period to support the project. This marks continued progress towards fully delivering the government’s manifesto commitment to create three new national forests in England.

The new national forest – to be located in either the Midlands or North of England – is expected to be up to 600 square miles in scale, large enough to make a significant long-term contribution to tree-planting targets, while sitting comfortably within the area’s existing landscape and local identity. Eligible organisations across the Midlands and North of England are invited to submit bids to become a delivery partner.

The third new national forest will have a particular focus on improving health outcomes for communities, with low-income communities disproportionately feeling the impacts of poor access to green and blue spaces. There is compelling evidence that access to woodland and green spaces delivers substantial public health benefits,

At first, the small purple flowers are hard to spot in the weak May sunshine. Slowly the drifts of delicate mountain pansies, along with the white rosettes of alpine pennycress, begin to jump out, scattered across an area little bigger than a football pitch, on the banks of the River Allen in Northumberland.

This is a pocket of calaminarian grassland, an increasingly rare habitat where specialist plants called metallophytes have adapted to live in soils deeply contaminated by heavy metals, the legacy of more than 1,000 years of lead mining.

“This is absolutely a case of nature responding to pollution caused by humans,” says Geoff Dobbins, estates manager for the Northumberland Wildlife Trust, who is passionate about saving these grasslands.

A unique and ancient Cornish moorland landscape has become a National Nature Reserve, bringing together more than 1,100 hectares for nature recovery.

The Mid Cornwall Moors has been declared the 14th site in the King's Series of National Nature Reserves (NNRs), more than doubling the area of land managed for nature in this historic landscape, with the equivalent of 1,500 football pitches of moorland.

The creation of this new network across Cornwall's distinctive "clay country" has been described as a "powerful recognition of the landscape's extraordinary natural and cultural heritage".

The results of the 2026 Big Farmland Bird Count (BFBC) show that farms providing supplementary feeding are supporting higher numbers of many farmland bird species whose breeding populations are declining nationally.

Run by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and sponsored by the NFU, the BFBC takes place each year in February and encourages farmers and land managers to record the bird species and numbers on their farms.

Since 2014 it has formed a national census of farmland birds. It also aims to raise awareness of the important role that land managers play in helping birds across the countryside, quantifies the impact of the conservation work that many farms and estates carry out, and highlights the crucial support agri-environment schemes provide.

Environmental charities have warned that Scotland’s flagship plan to restore nature is not yet delivering the change needed on the ground, as a new public tracker reveals that more than one in three actions set out in the plan are either delayed or have not been started.

The Scottish Biodiversity Strategy Delivery Plan (2024–2030), published by the Scottish Government, sets out how Scotland aims to halt nature loss by the end of the decade, including restoring peatlands, improving the health of our rivers, protecting our seas and supporting wildlife conservation. But a new Scottish Biodiversity Strategy Tracker, launched today by Scottish Environment LINK, shows a growing gap between promises and progress.

The tracker analyses all 136 actions in the plan and finds that around one in seven (18 actions) are complete, about half (69) are in progress, and more than a third are behind schedule (16 delayed and 33 not started).

An ecologist says it will take 20 to 30 years for a stretch of River Lugg in Herefordshire to recover after being damaged by a local farmer.

John Price was jailed in 2023 for illegally removing tonnes of gravel from the riverbed to build a road and horse yard at his home and tearing out 71 trees.

He was ordered to pay £600,000 and to restore the damage he had done.

Precious wildlife habitat in our most important places for nature is set to be restored thanks to a new government fund, Nature Minister Mary Creagh announced today (Monday 25 May).

The government will invest £30 million to restore and create wildlife-rich habitats across England’s most iconic landscapes from the wilds of Dartmoor to the rugged Lake District.

Our protected landscapes act as vital havens for the country’s most threatened species such as hedgehogs, hazel dormouse, water vole, and rare birds like the curlew and turtle dove, with habitat degradation being one of the main drivers for their decline.

Wildlife including sand lizards, deer and badgers are using a new crossing linking two protected heathland sites near Cobham, in Surrey.

Sand lizards have been spotted on a heathland bridge over the A3, which has reconnected two key wildlife sites for the first time in decades.

The crossing opened over the bank holiday weekend, and National Highways said that reptiles, deer and badgers were already using it.

A charity has launched a £5m fundraising campaign to secure tracts of land which could help support the native red squirrel population.

The Woodland Trust wants to raise £4.86m to acquire 348 acres (141 hectares) of Snaizeholme Valley, near Hawes, as a "once in a lifetime opportunity".

The land, where red squirrels already roam and forage, has been temporarily secured thanks to the help of a "sympathetic organisation", giving the charity two years to raise the money.

Some of Britain's rarest birds of prey are still being illegally killed despite decades of legal protection, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

The charity's report, to be published on Wednesday, records 921 confirmed attacks between 2015 and 2024, with more than half, according to the RSPB, on or near land managed for game shooting.

Mark Thomas, head of the RSPB's investigations unit, said the killings were "about money", with birds of prey targeted to stop them taking young pheasants, partridges or grouse, leaving more birds to be shot by paying customers.

Volunteers have started a second attempt in two years to find dormice on former farmland.

The group is using small black tunnels with a blank strip of paper and a pad inside to try to record the shy creatures' footprints as they pass through.

Dr Paul Howe, Ecology Manager from Eastleigh Borough Council (EBC), said efforts like these were important to help decide how to manage the land and benefit the wildlife at the site.

The entire catchment of the River Wye has been formally recognised as a living ecosystem with intrinsic rights in a charter, a UK first that campaigners hope will help save the highly polluted river.

The charter was celebrated at a community event at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival on Sunday. It includes the right to flow, to biodiversity, to be free from pollution, to be supported by a healthy catchment, to regenerate, and the right to be represented, described as a “significant step” towards protecting and restoring one of the UK’s most beloved rivers.

Herefordshire and Powys county councils have already implemented the charter and it is expected to be adopted soon by Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire, covering the entirety of the Wye’s 130-mile course from its source in the Cambrian mountains in mid Wales to Chepstow and the Bristol Channel.

Peatland ACTION is calling on everyone with a passion for one of the country’s most iconic and vital landscapes to get involved in shaping its first ever industry standard.

Scotland has around two million hectares of peatlands, representing almost a quarter of our land surface. When they are in good condition, peatlands are carbon sinks, estimated to hold the equivalent of 140 years’ worth of the country’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions, providing clean drinking water and flood regulation in our everyday lives. They offer a special and unique home for wildlife, and they are vital to farming, sporting, tourism and crofting economies. They are also, however, currently one of our largest degraded ecosystems, making them sources of carbon contributing to climate change.

Scotland’s Peatland Standard will provide shared technical guidance for everyone involved in protecting, restoring and managing peatland. It will introduce collective principles and clarity on legal and good practice requirements, improving the sector through quality and consistency.

Half of UK adults say they spend less than three hours a week outside in nature

Most people have joyful memories of playing outside as children – and now wildlife charities are urging people to ‘rewild their inner child’ Damian Carrington Environment editor Mon 25 May 2026 07.00 CEST Prefer the Guardian on Google

Climbing trees, squelching in mud, paddling in ponds or making dens in the woods – people’s memories of playing outside as children are often vivid and, a new poll has found, overwhelmingly positive, even those who remember falling in cowpats.

Almost 90% of UK adults had rosy memories of the excitement and the feeling of freedom that outdoor play had brought them, the survey found. However, almost half of adults now spend less than three hours a week in natural settings such as gardens, parks, fields or woods, according to the survey. For one in 10 it is less than one hour.

The poll of 2,000 people carried out for the Wildlife Trusts found that this contrasted sharply with childhood, when almost two-thirds of people said they had spent more than half their free time outside.

The scheme, led by Durham County Council and the Heritage Coast Partnership, focused on restoring magnesian limestone grasslands between Nose's Point near Seaham and Blackhall Rocks.

The cash from the government's Species Survival Fund was spent restoring and protecting the area's plants, insects and birds, with community engagement being central to the scheme.

The county council said Durham grasslands were "globally unique" because of the magnesian limestone exposed at the coast, and the project was one of only 20 funded nationally to halt species decline by 2030.

A conservation group is urging people to lend a hand tackling one of the country's most invasive non-native plants.

Himalayan balsam, recognisable by its pink bonnet-shaped flowers and thin stems, is a common sight along waterways.

West Cumbria Rivers Trust (WCRT) is encouraging communities to form "balsam bashing" teams to help remove it because it outcompetes native plants, reduces biodiversity and leaves riverbanks bare in winter when it dies back.

David Craven often jokes to people about how to get to Spurn Point.

"You drive through Hull and carry on till the end of the world," he says of the remote peninsula at the tip of the East Yorkshire coast.

Craven works for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT), which is celebrating 30 years of the Spurn nature reserve.

During that time, the trust has had to deal with the tides of change, from days when residents would hang out their washing outside a neat row of homes, to allowing nature to reclaim the area.

Scottish Forestry has once again been challenged on its decision that a major forestry plantation in the south of Scotland can proceed without the need for an environmental impact assessment (EIA).

The latest challenge concerns a 307-hectare conifer scheme proposed for Duchrae, near St John’s Town of Dalry in Dumfries and Galloway.

It is the fourth time in two years that the Scottish Government agency has been taken to court over its involvement in large-scale forestry plantations.

The University of Portsmouth last week welcomed hundreds of volunteers to its Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) to help prepare 20,000 native oysters for deployment onto a new reef in Chichester Harbour - marking a major milestone in the UK’s largest subtidal oyster reef restoration project.

Between 11–15 May, around 260 volunteers gathered in Portsmouth for a series of “biosecurity days”, carefully cleaning and checking oysters before their release onto the newly constructed reef. The oysters were deployed in Chichester Harbour by Blue Marine Foundation at the end of the week, representing a significant step in restoring one of the Solent’s most threatened marine habitats.

A ban on muck-spreading over winter months to protect rivers doesn't work and will be changed, the Welsh government's new environment minister has said.

The regulations - brought in by the previous Labour government - were championed by river campaigners but angered many farmers.

Llyr Gruffydd MS, newly appointed Cabinet Minister for Rural Resilience and Sustainability, said technology could be used to help manage slurry spreading rather than "farming by calendar".

Conservationists have mapped out more than 70,000 weirs, dams and other river barriers across the UK, warning that they are a “huge problem” for wildlife and pollution.

A new database compiled by environmental charity WildFish reveals there is an average of one manmade barrier for every 2.5km (1.5 miles) of waterway across 150,000km (93,000 miles) of rivers across Britain.

Many of these weirs, concrete dams, underwater gates and other barriers are “old, redundant” installations that serve no practical purpose, the charity says.

A UK-wide rock pooling competition is inviting the public to help uncover coastal biodiversity.

The Big Rock Pool Challenge National BioBlitz 2026, taking place from May 23 to 31, encourages communities to explore their local coastlines, discover marine species and record their findings in a national BioBlitz.

Dr Ben Holt, CEO of The Rock Pool Project, said: "This is about turning curiosity into action with a healthy bit of competition along the way.