Did you know there are rainforests in the UK?

The COVID-19 pandemic presented our organisation with the opportunity to do more in our base country as we couldn’t fly out to our original project zone.

Besides our local efforts to fight the spread of American signal crayfish through Oxfordshire’s fresh waterways (check out the story here), we have also been looking into how we can help to protect the last of the UK’s temperate rainforests.

An Unlikely Adversary

Sadly, the problems that this unique and relatively unknown habitat is facing are already worryingly diverse, with forests being lost to overgrazing, invasive plant species and disease, to name but a few. Much has already been lost, and what is left is fragmented, broken and often isolated in a wider landscape.

Grazing is by far the biggest direct threat, with more than 12,000 hectares of rainforest facing a level of grazing that will impact their long-term survival, diversity and regeneration. That being said, the biggest threat is actually deer, as livestock is only responsible for 20% of rainforest overgrazing.

What We’re Doing About It

We source all of our meat through British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) accredited stalkers (and our crayfish through Crayaway!), this is so we can do our bit to help reduce the detrimentally high population numbers of these species.

Furthermore, we only source from parts of the country where these species are causing trouble for their respective ecosystems: Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Devonshire.

We have recently begun talks with local organisations to start reforestation programmes in this country’s last temperate rainforest havens - watch this space!

Stay tuned for some exciting updates as we develop our post-pandemic roadmap for The Rainforester’s venture into UK temperate rainforest and fresh waterway conservation!