Our work
What we do
Five strands of work, all pointing the same way: more habitat, in better condition, better connected, and managed by people who know what they are doing and why.
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Strategy and evidence
The partnership takes a strategic view of the challenges and opportunities for the natural environment across the whole of Berkshire. Looking at nature at county scale, rather than site by site, is what lets limited resources be pointed where they will do the most good.
That work now runs through the Local Nature Recovery Strategy, which supersedes Berkshire's earlier Biodiversity Action Plan and Biodiversity Opportunity Areas as the county's spatial plan for nature. The partnership supported its preparation and now oversees its delivery: tracking what is happening against the priorities, keeping the underlying habitat and species evidence current, and reporting on progress.
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Influencing policy and planning
Most of what determines whether nature recovers in Berkshire is decided elsewhere: in local plans, in planning applications, in national consultations, in the design of agri-environment schemes. The partnership responds to these with a single county-wide, evidence-led position.
Since the Environment Act 2021, that voice has more to work with. Public authorities have a duty to have regard to relevant Local Nature Recovery Strategies, and Biodiversity Net Gain gives the strategy's mapped priorities real weight in where compensation habitat is created. Making sure Berkshire's plan is actually used in those decisions is a core part of what we do.
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Advice and expertise
The partnership is a network of advice and expertise on the natural environment in Berkshire — ecologists, land managers, hydrologists, recorders, planners. We connect people who have a question to the people who can answer it, and we help landowners and community groups work out what would genuinely help on the ground they are responsible for.
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Habitat connectivity and nature recovery
Berkshire's important wildlife sites are, for the most part, too small and too far apart. The long-standing answer — set out in the Lawton review, Making Space for Nature — is more, bigger, better and joined up. The strategy's habitat map is that principle made specific: it identifies both the areas already particularly important for biodiversity and the much larger area that could become important if the right things happen there.
The partnership's job is to help those things happen: matching opportunity to landholding, landholding to funding, and funding to delivery.
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Improving awareness
A strategy nobody has read changes nothing. We work to make Berkshire's nature recovery plans legible — to residents, to landowners, to councillors, to businesses — and to make the case for why they matter, in plain language and with the evidence attached. This website, and the guided map story behind it, are part of that.
What has changed
For most of the partnership's life, Berkshire's strategic approach to nature ran through the county Biodiversity Action Plan and its 29 Biodiversity Opportunity Areas. Those did their job: they established that habitat targets should be set at landscape scale and that opportunity should be mapped, not guessed.
The Local Nature Recovery Strategy takes that approach and gives it statutory footing, national consistency and a far richer evidence base. Where the BOAs identified broad areas of opportunity, the LNRS Local Habitat Map identifies specific areas and ties them to named priorities and measures. Where the BAP was a voluntary agreement among partners, the LNRS is a plan that public authorities must have regard to.
Older references to the BAP and BOAs remain useful history, but the LNRS is the current plan. Where the two differ, the LNRS governs.
Looking for something specific?
The published strategy documents, the Local Habitat Map, and the guided walk-through of Berkshire's priorities are all a click away.