Looking into the Dublin Mountains Partnership, which we began to cover parts of in our two last two posts we were pleasantly surprised by the initiative. Starting to restore the balance between commercial forestry, recreation and enhancing habitats that can support biodiversity.

We wait to see whether this will be limited or form part of a much wider plan to actually start respecting nature across the region and the rest of Ireland. Is it just a diversion to placate people who know what they are looking at when they see a monocultural forest? In Alaska and other places around the world, pipelines will often be screened off with strips of forest to stop them being seen from the road, but hopefully we see this spread.

A key element of the EU Biodiversity Strategy is the recently passed Nature Restoration Law. Acknowledging that we are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and developing legally binding nature restoration targets.

All of the appropriate assessment type reporting that we have done so far in the form of our ‘Biodiversity History’ reports have been compiled for landowners in our network, focused on their particular plots of land and how they could better optimise for biodiversity.

In the next few articles we are going to take a much wider view and look at each of Irelands national parks in turn as well as initiatives like the Dublin Mountains Partnership and others that we come across. Theres some surprising information in the databases when you really delve into them and its really uplifting to uncover synergies between information and calls to action where they exist.

There is only so much to explore thanks to the citizen scientists that have recorded what they have seen over the years and we’d like to acknowledge the work of the Biodiversity Data Centre in collating it all in such an accessible way. This really is a tremendous resource that more people could use to explore their own backyards and the national picture.

There is such wealth in biodiversity.

In fact if you want to put a figure on it (some have; not carbon markets), every € invested in nature restoration returns €38 in benefits to society.

We hope that our distillation of the available resources for different areas of the country will inspire more people to look out for certain species, record them and think about how they can optimise for biodiversity where they live by nurturing the kinds of habitats needed for more species to thrive.

The grounds for restoring nature lies in the past. Different resources when put together provide a really good guide for the future and form the basis for the type of appropriate assessment, Biodiversity History reports we make.

Thanks for reading.