Why nature recovery
Nature at risk
Berkshire is a rich county for wildlife and a crowded one for people. Those two facts have been pulling against each other for decades, and the evidence — national and local — says nature has been losing.
What the evidence shows
State of Nature 2023 — the UK's leading assessment of its wildlife, produced by more than 60 research and conservation organisations from data gathered largely by volunteer recorders — found that species abundance across the UK has fallen by an average of 19% since 1970, and that nearly one in six of the more than 10,000 species assessed is now at risk of being lost from Great Britain altogether.
Berkshire has not been exempt. The sites that remain important for wildlife here are, for the most part, small and isolated from one another by roads, settlements and intensively farmed land — and a wood or a meadow surrounded by development can be well managed and still lose species, because nothing can move in to replace what is lost.
- 19% average decline in UK species abundance since 1970
- 1 in 6 of the 10,000+ species assessed is at risk of being lost from Great Britain
- 943 species listed as of principal importance for conservation in England
- 15 UK priority habitats found here in Berkshire
The habitats Berkshire is responsible for
Of the 45 habitats identified as a UK conservation priority, 15 occur in Berkshire. Each needs different, specific management — there is no single fix for grassland, wetland and heathland alike.
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Woodland
Berkshire's largest priority habitat by area: 18,000 ha of woodland, of which 9,160 ha (7% of the county) is priority habitat, from wet woodland along the river corridors to ancient wood-pasture and parkland. Windsor Great Park alone holds more ancient oaks than Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands combined.
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Wetland
Rivers (including nationally scarce chalk rivers), fens, reedbeds, floodplain grazing marsh and standing waters, across the Thames, Kennet, Lambourn, Pang, Loddon and Colne catchments.
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Grassland
Three priority types — lowland meadows, lowland dry acid grassland and lowland calcareous grassland — among the richest habitats for plant and invertebrate diversity anywhere in the county.
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Heathland
Once far more widespread, now reduced to around 2% of the county compared with a 5% national average, concentrated on the free-draining soils of south-east Berkshire and at Greenham Common. The Thames Basin Heaths Special Protection Area protects what remains for rare ground-nesting birds.
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Orchards and hedgerows
Traditional orchards and farmland hedgerows are both long-established, low-key habitats that punch well above their size — hedgerows in particular act as wildlife corridors for bats, dormice, reptiles and farmland birds, and are still being lost to intensive management and development.
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Urban
Towns and villages are often richer in wildlife than intensively farmed countryside — parks, gardens and pockets of remnant ancient habitat give most people their only regular contact with nature.
Species still holding on here
England's Section 41 list names 943 species of principal importance for conservation. Berkshire is still home to a number of them, including the lesser stag beetle, otter, adder, marsh fritillary, water vole, brown long-eared bat, lapwing and hedgehog — alongside the ongoing pressure of invasive non-native species, from American mink (a direct threat to the water vole) to invasive Rhododendron, which compete with and displace them.
What actually helps
The response is not new and it is not complicated. Professor Sir John Lawton's 2010 review, Making Space for Nature, set it out in four words that have shaped conservation policy ever since: habitat needs to be more, bigger, better and joined up.
What has been missing is the specificity — a map that says which habitat, where, and why there. That is what Berkshire's Local Nature Recovery Strategy provides. Its habitat map identifies 166 km² already particularly important for biodiversity, and a further 299 km² that could become important with the right action — and it ties that mapping to named priorities and practical measures rather than leaving it as a wash of colour.
None of it happens automatically. The map shows where action would count; it takes landowners, councils, funders and communities to deliver it.
The full story, on the map
We have built a guided walk-through of Berkshire's nature recovery priorities: what is at risk, where, and what the strategy proposes to do about it — read from wherever you stand, whether that is a back garden in Reading, a farm on the downs, a development site or a council planning desk.
From problem to plan
Berkshire's Local Nature Recovery Strategy is the county's answer to everything on this page. It is published, it is mapped, and it is public.