Current Projects
We will be running wildlife based family activities every Wednesday morning for four weeks in August.
Click for more details
We continue to offer people with visual impairment the opportunity to explore the countryside through a programme of specifically designed educational walks.
Subjects include grassland habitats, wildflowers - including orchids - as well as bats and glow-worms. With funding from Gloucestershire Association for Disability, we have recruited and trained additional sighted guides to support this programme. 
These volunteers offer contact and non-contact guiding to the participants and make the project possible. While many of the participants comment that the walks offer them a life-line, the sighted guides find that describing and interpreting the countryside around them adds a new dimension to their own appreciation of the subjects.
Growing Wild
Autumn is always our busiest time of year and this year has been no exception. The new term started with lots of minibeasting, with children finding all sorts of invertebrates including their favourite, the Devil’s Coach Horse Beetle, as well as a few newts and toads! We also planted school gardens with autumn sown crops including garlic, onions, winter lettuce, broad beans and peas.
We continue to be a member of the Gloucestershire Biodiversity Partnership. Through recording and reporting survey results and habitat improvements, we make a measurable contribution to the Gloucestershire Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP). This, in turn contributes to the South West BAP and ultimately the UK BAP. As always, SVP works at a local level, and supports parishes in finding ways of contributing to the national plan. In early 2009, we were appointed lead partner for hedgerows within the Gloucestershire Partnership, in recognition of the work we have undertaken in the past on planting and restoring hedgerows. This position has been further underpinned by the funding awarded to SVP by DEFRA for work on hedgerow surveying. Again based in the Severn Vale, this survey work planned for the summer of 2009 will contribute to DEFRA’s national hedgerow survey project.
Through the Gloucestershire Biodiversity Partnership’s “No Newts is Bad Newts” project, SVP was contracted to establish the extent of Great Crested Newts in Eastington parish. Nine ponds were surveyed during June 2008 with the threatened newt being identified in two of the ponds surveyed. Having identified the existence of the newts, pond restoration works were carried out by SVP to allow in more light and create more open water thereby improving the habitat.
The Green Team: Open to All is designed to help people with mental health problems get better and acquire new skills during practical conservation sessions. It’s an open, socially inclusive group for people from all walks of life, who enjoy working outdoors and learning new things. This project has grown out of our previous project, Biodiversity of Urban Greenspaces, and you can find more information about this project by clicking here.
We are starting our second year of working with Stroud Farmers’ Market running their children’s activity days. We ran our first one of 2017 in March and were visited by over a hundred children.
A new partnership in 2008 was formed with the Gloucestershire County Council Rights of Way department.
Nine stiles were replaced with kissing gates to improve access on footpaths around Kings’s Stanley and Leonard Stanley. This project was also supported by the two parish councils, who provided the gates.
In Cam, five kissing gates were installed on the path from St George’s Church up to Cam Peak. Here, additional financial support came from Cam Parish Council and the Cam Wildlife Group.
Last August we began working in the walled garden. Tucked away behind the Museum in the Park, this secret space has been abandoned for many years now. Our work there is the first stage in a process that will gradually see the garden returned to a beautiful and functional space.
The team of volunteers from Stroud Valleys Project and the museum has been steadily uncovering ground that has lain buried beneath brambles, elder, sycamore saplings and nettles since the end of the last century.
The Thursday volunteers have been working with Stroud Town Council (STC) Green Spaces Team at Bisley Road Cemetery in Stroud under the watchful eye of Jim Mathison and his team to strim and rake up grass cuttings over the past few weeks.
Thanks to the warm weather, our team has been able to appreciate at first hand some of the amazing wildlife that lives there, such as Slow worm and Common lizard - see picture.
