Staff Stories: Harry

In our next staff stories series our Land Management Trainee, Harry, tells us all about his experience at the Trust and what projects he has been working on.

My name is Harry and I’m a Land Management Trainee. I work on the Derwent Connections project backed by the Green Recovery Challenge Fund. I have been in this role since February but have worked for Derbyshire Wildlife Trust for 18 months now over two roles. My current role largely concerns advising landowners and writing grant applications for woodland creation schemes to help create an interconnected nature corridor across the county. This role has also allowed me to work on our water vole reintroduction project, nature led grounds management at our corporate partner sites, surveying local wildlife sites and species monitoring our newest reserve Derwent Meadows! These are just a few of the plethora of experiences I’ve had during my time here as a trainee and I am exposed to more and more new aspects of the sector every week.

The Derwent Connections project exists to try and create a more resilient Derwent Catchment. This means a river catchment in which intense rain fall an river flow events are distributed evenly across the landscape to ensure residential areas, farms and dry habitat don’t have to experience severe flood events ideally. This involves making a few changes to the existing landscape through restoring the historically larger amount of peatlands, wetlands and woodlands in the county. The planting of more woodlands throughout Derbyshire (where appropriate) will make not only more physical barriers to flood water, but also a greater amount of evapotranspiration of water occurring, reduced soil erosion through slope stabilization of river banks and other gradients and increase rainfall residency time as it must pass through a dense tree canopy before reaching the ground. Beyond this more woodland will create a slue of other ecological and environmental benefits such as greater carbon sequestration and a much larger area of habitat for woodland fauna and flora that used to account for a much higher percentage of the surface area of both the county and UK.

This feels like vital work to the organization, myself and many of the landowners who have engaged us via our social media adverts and community event appearances. I knew this role would be perfect for me to contribute meaningful work and grow as a conservationist after my first job at DWT. This was a government kickstart role which had me assisting our reserves officers in maintaining management documents of our reserves, practically maintaining them by leading volunteers and any other duties that fall within managing land for nature. This time exposed me to so many problems to solve and new experiences to learn from that it made me a well rounded worker within land management and allowed me to take on my current job as a trainee advisor which has done exactly the same for my skills, experience and knowledge surrounding nature’s protection and enhancement across a variety of habitats and formats.