The first wildlife highway to enable animals and plants to escape the worst effects of climate change will be announced today. A corridor 30 miles (50km) long and up to 10 miles wide is to be created in the Severn Vale in Gloucestershire to provide an escape route for wildlife.
Animals will be able to use the corridor like a road so that when temperatures caused by global warming become too much for them they are able to move to cooler areas.
The scheme involves returning land to a wild condition and linking up sections. In some areas small changes will be made, such as ensuring that a ditch between two areas of wetland remains filled with water.
Birds such as snipe and curlew, mammals including otters, harvest mice and hares, and rare invertebrates will be among the beneficiaries of the scheme. Among the plants that will be helped are mousetails, which need boggy terrain.
Winning the support of farmers and landowners is vital to the project and conservationists intend to work with them to identify simple measures that can be invaluable for wildlife. The measures are likely to include changing livestock grazing patterns to prevent pasture becoming too uniform and managing water resources so that some land remains damp all year.
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Wildlife highway
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