TVERC Spring Recorders' Conference

We held our Spring Recorders conference on the mornings of Friday 18^th and Saturday 19^th March. Once again it was held online using Google Meets, with nearly 70 attendees across the two days. We heard from a range of speakers, from national initiatives, to local groups, to students. We'd like to say a huge 'thank you' to all our speakers and delegates for giving up their time to take part. It really was inspiring to hear about all your hard work and passion for protecting and monitoring biodiversity.

First up was our Biological Recording Co-ordinator, Henrietta Pringle, who, in celebration of reaching our fantastic milestone of 4 million species records, gave us an insight into what makes up these records. Next, we heard from Grace Johnson about Hedgehog Street, the latest State of Britain’s Hedgehogs Report, and examples of how community actions are helping hogs. Lucy Kennery gave an overview of the Lower Windrush Valley Project including an exciting programme of events to celebrate their 20 year anniversary! What started as a map in a shop in 2019 grew into Eynsham Nature Recovery Network, recently awarded the High Sheriff’s Climate Action Heroes Award. Kevan Martin and Catriona Bass explained their exciting approach to engage the local community in biodiversity monitoring, ensuring skills and knowledge are passed on. We ended Day 1 with a session of speed updates from our most recent intake of micro-interns. These students form Oxford University spend 5 days working on projects with us. Jonathan Rutter, Harri Ravenscroft, and Katie Jones took us through their work mapping and analysing the distributions of butterfly species across the TVERC region.

Ruth Ashcroft from Friend’s of Aston’s Eyot opened Day 2 of the conference with a talk about the work they do to restore habitat and record wildlife on this former landfill site. Mark Bradfield from the Letcombe Brook Project spoke to us about this valuable chalk stream. By reducing shade and tackling invasive species, they’ve seen an increase in Water vole and Otter activity. Next, we had two talks about moths in the region, the first from Martin Harvey, Berkshire moth recorder who revealed moth records have just passed the one million mark for the county! One of our previous students, Dakota Reid, demonstrated how these records can be used, mapping the distributions of Drab Looper, Drinker and Lackey Moths in Berkshire. Our next speed update came from Tom Hollier from Nottingham Trent University, about student-led meadow creation. He and the Conservation Society secured funding for and sowed meadows around the halls of residence – a fantastic example of students working to improve biodiversity in the area. The final talk of the day, and the conference, came from The Ridgeway Project’s Sarah Wright and TVERC’s Julie Kerans. They gave an update about the recent habitat surveys we carried out along the National trail, as well as some background about the project. Sarah is looking for volunteers to help with future monitoring, so do get in touch to find out more (sarah.wright@oxfordshire.gov.uk).

Given that the conference was online, we introduced some interactive elements, using Slido polls to get some discussion going. This was the first time we’ve used them in a conference so we were keen to try them out and see how engaging they would be. They seemed to work quite well but we’d welcome any feedback about the conference and the use of polls as a discussion tool. Please fill out our feedback form, where you can also tell us if you'd be interested in giving a talk at a future conference. If you missed the conference, or would like to revisit any of the talks, they are available on our YouTube channel here.