Conserve
Now it’s time to take action to protect or restore your wild place. You can do practical conservation activities, raise awareness or take other actions to help protect wild places.
Consider the longevity of your actions – how can you sustain the benefits beyond your Award activities? By engaging in the Conserve Challenge, you will help the John Muir Trust look after wild places across the whole of the UK.
The Conserve Challenge is about looking after your wild place. It’s important to consider how your activity will have a positive impact. Your aim should be to conserve, protect and restore wild places to enable natural processes to thrive. Sometimes well-intentioned efforts can make a place less wild; your plans may benefit humans but have unforeseen negative impacts on your wild place.
If you’re adding artificial features (like bird boxes, bug hotels, hedgehog houses, or feeders) because natural processes are missing, think about how you can encourage those natural processes to return over time. This way, your wild place can thrive with low levels of human intervention in the future.
Questions to consider:
- How will your activities encourage the restoration, protection and conservation of your chosen wild place?
- How will your activities enable natural processes to thrive?
- How will your activity benefit your wild place for future generations?
Here are some examples of activities to consider for the Conserve challenge. This is not intended as a complete list, so feel free to come up with your own ideas.
- Litter picking, create posters to improve awareness about litter issues in your area
- Plant for wildlife – remember to use peat-free compost
- Tree and hedge planting
- Path repair or creating new or wider pathways to improve access for everyone
- Build wildlife ponds
- Re-wetting bogs
- Surveying the plants/animals in your wild place
- Submit monitoring data to national database systems such as iNaturalist, Big Garden Bird Watch
- Leaving an area to regenerate and restore natural processes – leave the weeds!
- Create homes for wildlife
- Remove invasive species
- Grow your own food in harmony with nature – remember to use peat-free compost
- Campaign on issues affecting your wild place
Share Challenge
Take pride in what you have achieved and inspire others to take action for wild places too
What's next
Discover Challenge
Immerse yourself in your wild place, experience it through your senses and notice the things that make it special
Learn more
