David Bellamy Conservation Awards

General Management Issues

It is best to plan your environmental work alongside the work you do to develop and manage your park. One way forward is to see what key habitats and wildlife your park already has by doing a species count and a habitat survey (your local wildlife trust should be able to help). Using this information you can then draw up an action plan to conserve and enhance your park’s wildlife.

Your action plan will almost certainly involve breaking your park down into different areas and habitat types and working out specific improvement projects (such as digging a new pond or new planting) alongside longer-term management work (such as thinning woodland to encourage more biodiversity). You will probably have to back up your plans with some staff training. The scope of this will depend on your park – a large commercial park may operate formalised training programmes, on smaller ‘family’ parks this work will probably be less structured. One source of information on environmental training is the new Environmental Unit of NVQ2 Operational Services (details from CITO.) A short textbook is also available which you may also find helpful.

• Think about having a written ecological ‘strategy’ or ‘mission statement’ to focus your work.
• Get a wildlife survey done and use it to develop an ecological action plan.
• Involve staff – they can be a mine of ‘good ideas’ and will be the people doing all the work!
• Provide staff training on ecological management issues (structured or informal, depending on your circumstances).
• Monitor improvements by doing regular species counts (get your guests involved!).