UK Nature Recovery

Furthering the science-led recovery of the UK’s nature by generating data, tools and agency to take nature-positive action.

The UK’s biodiversity is among the most thoroughly documented in the world. More than 70,000 species are known to occur across the British Isles, with more being discovered each year.

A long history of observational study means that occupancy and trend data are available for many species groups over multiple decades. But despite numerous conservation successes, key biodiversity metrics indicate that UK nature is in crisis, with its ecosystems being among the world’s least intact.

Beyond the British Isles, UK Overseas Territories support diverse flora and fauna of global significance, yet this nature is also under extreme pressure.

Biodiverse, well-functioning ecosystems are essential to human wellbeing and quality of life. Securing a brighter future for the UK’s nature, and through this its people, is a shared endeavour that necessitates collaboration across sectors and throughout society.

Through the lenses of three key areas of research, we’re reevaluating how we study and progress the recovery of UK nature.

We’ve developed our gardens into a collaborative Urban Research Station and training hub through which we’re gaining insights into how nature adapts and thrives within our towns and cities, and building associated wildlife identification, monitoring and management skills. By combining traditional and next-generation methods, including bioacoustics and environmental DNA, we’re using our gardens and a network of study sites across the UK to research the composition and dynamics of urban nature.

We’re also exploring the role that natural history museums can play in landscape-scale nature recovery initiatives, including how we can develop and use the collections we care for and our expertise to facilitate projects and understand their biodiversity benefits. We provide scientific backing to projects that have the potential to reintroduce lost processes, landscapes and species.

Our final focal area is the UK Overseas Territories, where we’re working in partnership with local stakeholders to help document, monitor and recover the rich biodiversity that underpins these predominantly oceanic island systems.

Projects