This project will maintain, create and link important wildlife habitats in the Mendip Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and beyond. Working with landowners, the project will help them identify wildlife hotspots and target conservation measures on their land to protect and buffer the richest habitats. • Where possible the project will investigate the possibility of re-creating habitat to link isolated sites and will work with Natural England to identify where funding is available to carry out this work. • It will help species to move to new suitable habitat enabling them to survive the threat of climate change. • The project will be working with a wide range of organisations to help monitor species over the next five years and beyond. • Species that we will be working on include the dormouse, greater and lesser horseshoe bat and skylark. These are but a few of the rare species that survive in the project area, and there are many more much loved common species. The project will also • Inspire everyone to create an area rich in wildlife • Through working with local communities providing talks and walks and youth educational events we hope to get people motivated about their local environment. • We also are going to develop a series of training activities to get people surveying wildlife in the countryside so that we can feed the information back into the project and answer the question ‘what effect is the project having on the wildlife in the west Mendip Hills?’ By involving people through surveying we hope to enable them to understand their local environment and become involved in looking after it.