Project Overview
Nattergal is a nature restoration company that restores ecologically degraded land, generating income through natural capital markets and ecotourism. In 2024 Nattergal acquired their third site, Harold’s Park Wildland in Essex. This is a 200 hectare site that will be transformed from low productivity arable fields and pony paddocks, to a diverse and dynamic mosaic of grassland, scrub, woodland and wetlands. The focus here will be the reinstatement of natural processes.
In the early years, Nattergal will undertake kickstarter interventions, such as spreading green hay and breaking land drains, before introducing free-roaming ancient breed cattle, pigs, and ponies to shape and drive the ecosystem, ultimately letting nature take the lead.
The Challenge
Rachel Blount, a Landscape Ecologist at Nattergal, leads the biodiversity monitoring programme. Due to the size of the site and diversity of habitat types present, Rachel was looking for an efficient digital solution to collecting UKHab and condition assessment data for Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) baselining.
Although the site baseline is largely arable and intensive pasture fields, there are also small and scattered pockets of ecological value, including woodlands, scrub belts, veteran trees, and ponds. These features will be great for the recovery of nature on the site but meant that the site would be time-consuming to baseline and that pen and paper data collection would be impractical.
Solution
Rachel identified Coreo as the ideal solution because Coreo provides a range of tools that streamline the entire survey workflow and save time, in particular thanks to the following:
- Coreo’s desktop pre-survey functionality
- The built-in condition assessment forms for use in the field
- Simple post-survey processing thanks to user-friendly tools to remove polygon overlaps for example
The Impact
Following the success of Coreo’s UKHab and BNG Platform, Rachel is now using Coreo’s bespoke and existing survey templates for all of Nattergal’s site baseline and monitoring programmes. This includes breeding bird surveys, common bird census, butterfly transects, reptile surveys, and earthworm counts.
“Digitising and standardising our suveys using Coreo has improved accuracy and saved us days of transcribing data back at the desk. This frees up more resources for analysis, interpretation on-the-ground action.” Rachel Blount, Landscape Ecologist.