Frampton Aggregates and Biodiversity is helping to reduce the impacts of aggregates extraction by restoring and creating traditional landscape features, biodiversity habitats, and wildlife corridors lost to extraction over time. The project will take place on land close to a gravel extraction site around the village of Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire, and will run until March 2011.

The work includes the creation and restoration of ponds and scrapes, hedges and hedgerow trees, orchards, and the planting of new in-field trees to safeguard the existence of old trees for the future.  Through surveying work, the project will identify important priority habitats or species in the Severn Vale, such as wet grassland, ancient hedgerows, and Great Crested Newts.

Footpaths will see improvements through better stiles and kissing gates. and there will be walks to show the public where these improvements have taken place. Educational events together with working with local schools will raise the awareness of our beautiful local biodiversity. 

This project will manage seven greenspaces in Stroud and Cainscross.  It will contribute to the Gloucestershire Biodiversity Action Plan by working on seven urban habitats, two ponds, seven priority BAP species and one protected species. All the sites are easily accessible, and well used by the local community.

We will organise habitat management workshops and wildlife surveys to continue to improve the habitats and to create new ones, as well as increasing the biodiversity of the sites in order to gain a better understanding of resident wildlife. We will promote wildlife gardening and pond building in these areas in order to increase environmental and conservation awareness.

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.

The success of the programme for people with visual impairment has encouraged us to set up a similar pilot project for people with hearing impairments. The pilot is again supported by Adult Education in Gloucestershire.  The project started in the spring of 2009, with training in deaf awareness, lipspeak, and alphabet signing for a group of potential guides to support hearing impaired people in a similar series of walks.

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.

Further access work will be undertaken in partnership with the Rights of Way team during 2009-10.

We have on going work with many schools and youth groups in the Stroud area. We aim to allow children to experience and learn about the biodiversity in their local area. We therefore involve them in conservation work at many of our sites and projects. We also run educational courses with environment themes. For example, with funding from Extended Services, we were able to run summer holiday activities at 2 schools in the Stonehouse area.  Two very different schools invited our involvement – Park Junior School and The Shrubberies, which caters for young people (from 2 to 19) with special educational needs.  Four sessions took place at each school, with a wide variety of nature-themed activities and games, from learning about bats to making scarecrows.