Our work to protect wildlife habitats

At Land Studio, our team creates places that enhance biodiversity, responsibly maximise the value of land, connect people with nature and, where possible, incorporate SuDS into the design. We also devise solutions to protect wildlife habitats.

As civil engineers and landscape architects it hasn’t always been normal practice to think about how animals undertake seasonal migration between land habitats and how we as designers often create barriers and traps in the built environment, such as new access roads or large paved areas.

With the new legal requirement for increased biodiversity, and to encourage wildlife to our sites, have we as an industry really thought about how the traditional design of our built environment may not be set up to protect existing habitats or to encourage new?

There will always be projects where it isn’t fully possible, or where a combination of green infrastructure and traditional drainage and hard landscape design need to come together.

We believe that the design of nature-based drainage features can be done in a way to ensure small animals and insects can get in and out of SuDS features. But how often do experts think about the migration between or across hard surfaces?

The ACO Group is a world leader in drainage technology and takes a holistic approach to its work. They have a number of excellent hard engineering solutions for wildlife migration. These include fence and tunnel channel systems, guide walls, wildlife kerbs or refuges and even gully ladders.

These are not a requirement of statutory policy so are often seen as a nice-to-have which, in an industry where cost is still often the driving factor, we need to think about how we design landscapes of the future that work for all – for people and for wildlife.

We also need to think about the types of wildlife that can be attracted to areas where drainage and landscape have been integrated – and those we’d rather discourage – and then the regular maintenance of these features. The key word here is regular because that’s the best way to ensure that animals that may be a nuisance aren’t encouraged to stay.

As well as drainage design that avoids flooding in the wider locality, we believe it’s key to provide naturalistic drainage features that are designed in an interesting and visually pleasing way and which incorporate a variety of suitable native species and also wildlife friendly ornamental species, which also provide habitats for a range of animals.

If we can provide spaces like this, they are far less likely to be treated badly and dumped with rubbish or waste. Dull wet hollows in the ground are much more likely to be tipped on and mistreated and that sort of habitat is more prone to having pest related problems.

With the right structures in place we can help to protect wildlife habitats in our built environments and make a difference to wildlife conservation.

• Get in touch if you would like to know how we could help you on your project.