Local conservation charity the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust (GWT) has secured £340,000 in funding from Natural England's Species Recovery Programme, to help ensure the future of some of our most endangered species, including the recovery of adders and native crayfish across the county.

The programme is designed to support targeted action for England's priority and threatened species, helping to improve their conservation status. As a result, two GWT projects have received funding: Recovering Adders on the Cotswold Escarpment and the River Frome Native Crayfish Recovery Project.

The Recovering Adders project will focus on enhancing the habitat for these enigmatic reptiles who call the grasslands and woodlands of the Cotswolds home. The UK's only venomous snake, the adder is an often misunderstood but wonderful species that has sadly been in huge decline across the country and now has protected status.

Grove Sykes, lead land manager at GWT, said: "The project is focused on enhancing and connecting important areas for these secretive and stunning reptiles. The Cotswold Escarpment hosts an important population of adders, but sadly they're facing lots of challenges. With help from this project, we'll be working with other landowners to plant hedgerows, manage scrub, create hibernaculas [places for adders to live] and create connections between suitable habitats, to encourage populations to move around, grow and ultimately strengthen and become more resilient."

Away from the grasslands and woodlands of the Cotswold Escarpment, the River Frome Native Crayfish Recovery Project will focus on improving the long-term survival chances of the elusive white-clawed crayfish within the River Frome catchment in Gloucestershire. Once widespread, this species has now been tragically decimated and is limited to four small areas of the river. The threat of crayfish plague, brought into our waterways by the introduction of non-native North American signal crayfish, means urgent action is required to increase the resilience of these last remaining populations and prevent their extinction here in Gloucestershire.

Richard Spyvee, GWT's lead on wilder landscapes, said: "We'll be using a range of techniques to combat the threats to our native crayfish, including conservation translocations where we move small numbers of existing crayfish and natural flood management, such as installing leaky dams, to restore these important ecosystem engineers. It's all about improving the range and resilience of the species, making the existing populations viable again and combatting the threat of extinction."

Ian Stevenson, GWT's head of nature recovery zones, commented that focusing on individual species at a time when the climate and nature crises are looming large might seem like an unusual approach but explained how the projects will have a significant impact beyond just adders and crayfish:

"Natural England's Species Recovery Programme is enabling us to not only recover high-priority species, but it's also allowing us to do this at a landscape scale in the Cotswolds. We're not just focusing on individual populations, but how these populations can be extended and enhanced across the landscape. This is great for adders and white-clawed crayfish, but also for a wealth of other species who will benefit from this vital work. It all adds up, with more and more species able to thrive and with essential ecosystems slowly being restored, all vital to tackling the climate and ecological crises in our wonderful county."