Donations doubled to boost Peak District wildlife

The Peak District National Park Foundation is taking part in the Big Give’s Green Match Fund, in which every donation is doubled for the benefit of nature.

The week-long campaign to create vital ‘wildlife corridors’ in the Peak District launches on April 22. 

Foundation director Roisin Joyce says: “We’re excited to be partnering with the Big Give in this Green Match Fund campaign which means that, for example, a £10 donation instantly becomes £20, allowing us to plant and protect even more trees. This is a rare opportunity to make twice the difference to one of our vital projects.” 

The money raised will be invested in tree planting in the White Peak, creating vital habitats for struggling species. 

The White Peak, known for its dramatic limestone dales and rolling farmland, faces a hidden crisis. Its wild woodlands are severely fragmented, surrounded by a plateau with just 2% tree cover. This isolation is threatening local wildlife, which depends on connected habitats to move, feed, and breed. 

Rhodri Thomas, Land & Nature Team Manager at the Peak District National Park Authority, says: “There's been ongoing habitat loss in the Peak District and that's resulted in declines of a lot of species and wildlife over the years. We want to mitigate that and support farmers to deliver wildlife conservation alongside food production.” 

The Landscape Trees of the Peak District project is fighting this habitat loss by planting individual trees and small copses in grazed farmland, the kinds of trees that fall outside of any existing national or regional funding schemes. 

The new trees will begin to link isolated ravine woodlands, creating vital wildlife corridors that support biodiversity and combat climate change. Support and guidance are also being offered to farmers to help integrate these trees into the working landscape. 

Robert Thornhill, a Great Longstone dairy farmer, is a spokesman for nature conservation work in White Peak farmland. He has been planting trees for the last 20 years and explains, “Trees provide shade and shelter for the livestock, and for any crops underneath. They will draw up nutrients lower down and cycle those by leaf deposition. There's a massive opportunity to increase ecology there without impacting negatively on productive farming at all.” 

In order for your donation to be matched, you need to make it before Tuesday April 29 by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/2dmpmjft 

Photo: Robert Thornhill watering a young tree along the boundary of his farmland in Great Longstone, Bakewell.