A Dorset landscape full of rare orchids and butterflies that inspired Victorian writer Thomas Hardy has been named England’s newest national nature reserve.

More than 330 hectares of important habitat at Lyscombe on the Dorset Downs, the equivalent to 468 football pitches, have been marked out as an area of focus for conservation and nature restoration by the government body Natural England.

Located north of Dorchester, the landscape is home to ancient woodland and chalk grassland flora, including at least six different species of orchid such as pyramidal and bee orchids, as well as rare chalkhill blue butterflies.

One of the UK's largest spider species has been spotted in the West Midlands as warmer temperatures push it more than 100 miles from its usual habitat.

The wasp spider, known for its distinctive yellow, black and white stripes, is traditionally found in southern England but has been recorded increasingly further north in recent years

Unlike its namesake, the species cannot fly, but spiderlings can travel long distances by "ballooning" on silk strands carried by the wind.

Wales’ relationship with nature may be changing, according to new research which suggests children are growing up recognising wildlife through pictures rather than through real-life outdoor experiences.

A new survey of 1,000 UK parents by holidaylodges.co.uk has uncovered what it’s calling Britain’s growing “nature knowledge gap”, revealing that while children correctly identify 94% of wildlife they can see, recognition drops dramatically when they’re asked to identify the sounds of nature. Just 65% could recognise the call of a crow, falling to 57% for a fox and 50% for a tawny owl. Most strikingly, fewer than half (41%) recognised the familiar coo of a wood pigeon.

The findings come as children spend an average of 3.35 hours every day on screens, while fewer than one in ten spend time immersed in nature daily.

A free diver has said he "couldn't believe his luck" after spotting a giant jellyfish off the Welsh coastline.

Iestyn Morgan, from Pembrokeshire, said the lion's mane was the "length of a bus" with a size of about 10 to 15 metres (32ft 8in to 49ft 2in).

The 21-year-old conservationist, who records footage for social media to raise awareness about the "threats our seas are facing", said it was the first lion's mane he had seen in Wales.

After one of the hottest summers on record, the humble pond is needed more than ever in the South Downs National Park.

Six new ponds will now be created or restored for nature as the National Park’s Pounds for Ponds scheme announces a new tranche of projects.

Over the past three years more than 30 ponds across Sussex and Hampshire have been transformed into havens for wildlife and now several more are in the offing.

New research commissioned by Wildlife and Countryside Link reveals that annual investment in protected nature sites needs to increase from around £1.1 billion today to approximately £2 billion to restore England’s protected places by 2042, the deadline for key Environment Act nature targets. This investment would also help deliver 30by30 – the commitment to protect and effectively manage 30% of England’s land and sea for nature by 2030.

England’s protected places, such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, National Landscapes, and National Parks, have the potential to be the crown jewels of a thriving landscape – places where wildlife flourishes and people can experience nature at its best. But decades of underinvestment, pollution and intensive industry have left too many habitats damaged and wildlife disappearing. With the right protection and investment, these places could once again become the thriving heart of nature's recovery across England and help keep our country safe from climate risks.

The research estimates that delivering 30by30 on land could create or restore at least one million hectares of wildlife-rich habitat – helping to build a bigger, better-connected network where nature can flourish.

As a summer of record-breaking dry weather and prolonged heat begins to come to a close, thousands of citizen scientists are preparing to take part in the Big River Watch to help monitor the impacts of extreme weather and pollution on river health and inform vital conservation work by The Rivers Trust.

From 18th – 24th September 2026, the public are invited to record observations of pollution, wildlife, and river conditions through The Rivers Trust's free Big River Watch app. Surveys take just 15 minutes to complete and key results are published in near-real time on the Big River Watch online dashboard, allowing anyone to see and help build a national picture of river health across one week.

Being the UK and Ireland's largest mass-participation river health survey, the Big River Watch returns at a crucial time following a summer of climate-change induced weather extremes which have caused significant stress for rivers and waterways. As much of the UK and Ireland begins to see rain return, the risk of 'weather whiplash' could increase pollutants entering waterways through soil runoff, or it may trigger significant flooding across the landscape, further exacerbating the poor state of rivers, endangering wildlife and causing anguish for communities. Now more than ever, The Rivers Trusts needs the public's help to fully understand the impact this is having on our waterways.

Results from a survey of Guernsey's freshwater habitats have been called "nothing short of incredible" as they reveal thousands of new species to the island.

The project from Guernsey Water and the Guernsey Nature Commission used environmental DNA to look for genetic traces left behind by organisms in the water.

The survey detected 2,630 organisms across 36 different groups, 2,249 of which had not been previously been recorded in the Guernsey Biological Records Database.

Conservationists who have helped reintroduce a butterfly back into England have been awarded £150,000 to expand the project over the next three years.

In total, 46 Chequered Skippers were released into Rockingham Forest close to Corby, Northamptonshire, in May, using a donor population from Belgium.

The funding has been given to the Butterfly Conservation charity from Natural England's Species Recovery Programme with the hope the species will be reintroduced to Peterborough.

A new project is helping to gather data on sharks which can be found off the Kent coastline.

Sharks of Kent is an initiative from Kent Wildlife Trust, led by their marine partners Adonis Blue.

Sharks are caught and important information is gathered before they're released so that scientists can help to track their movements and behaviour.

A restored wetland in Cheshire is now home to almost two-thirds of the UK's breeding black-necked grebes, one of the country's rarest breeding birds.

Woolston Eyes, near Warrington, was previously a dumping ground for dredging from the Manchester Ship Canal. It is now the site of the country's largest colony of the species.

Black-necked grebes are known for their distinctive golden facial tufts and average about 55 breeding pairs in the UK each year, according to the RSPB, external.

Charlie Sullivan has been a tattoo artist for 10 years and birds have always been the biggest inspiration for his artwork.

The 31-year-old, who works at the Golden Goose tattoo studio in Birmingham, said he had been drawing since he was a child and had always been obsessed with bird watching.

This love has led him to embark on a challenge to complete tattoos featuring every single bird native to Britain.

A charity has removed more than a tonne of rubbish from some of the most remote coastlines in the UK.

Clean Ocean Sailing's team of 16 Cornwall-based volunteers collected just under 1.3 tonnes of plastic, fishing gear and other waste from nine islands around the Isles of Scilly during a three-week expedition.

The project builds on previous clean-up missions in Scilly, where ocean currents carry debris from across the Atlantic and deposit it on beaches.

Rewilding areas do not usually conform to traditional notions of beauty in England’s green and pleasant land. Detractors may bewail the beaver-felled trees, untidy scrub, deadwood, weeds, mud and “mess”.

But a new exhibition highlights the aesthetic delights that can be discovered on rewilding sites where fungi grows on dying trees, water buffalo gather in new wetlands and brown-watered beaver pools flood once-desiccated fields.

The artist Rebecca Howard devoted two years to visiting rewilding projects across England before spending a month painting each of nine large canvases that reveal what happens when people step back from intensive management of land and allow wild nature to take a leading role.

A wildlife trust said it had been inundated with volunteers after a call for "oak nannies" to nurture young seedlings at home.

Susan Antrobus, from the Tees Valley Wildlife Trust, said a woman in Great Broughton got in touch after hundreds of oak saplings appeared under her tree.

However, upon collecting them, the trust realised they were too small to be planted on its nature reserves so called for people to look after the saplings for a year until they were big enough.

A tiny snail found in only one lake in the UK has been dubbed as precious as an Egyptian artefact as conservationists bid to save it.

Several British zoos are setting up so-called ark populations of the glutinous snail, one of Europe's rarest species, using creatures bred in a back garden in Ceredigion.

"Beguiled by their cuteness," conservationist Ian Hughes has made it his "life-defining" mission to protect the threatened mollusc, which was once widespread in UK waters.

High up on a Manx hillside, Sarah Hickey effortlessly pushes a metre-long metal rod into the wet ground until it disappears almost to her hands.

"This is pretty deep here," she says, reading the markings on the probe. Beneath her boots is peat, built up over thousands of years and consisting of partially decayed plants and organic matter.

Hickey is the island's Peatland Officer and part of an Uplands team of just three, who, between them, manage about 8,000 hectares of the Island's hills.

One year on from the deployment of specialist oyster reef cubes’ in the North Sea, dive surveys show native oysters surviving on the oyster restoration site.

We're celebrating after recent dive and underwater video surveys showed that adult and juvenile native oysters, UK’s underwater superheroes, are thriving on a newly restored native oyster reef habitat off the coast of Whitburn, South Tyneside. The dive surveys also showed that the oyster reef cubes are already providing a home to native fish and crustaceans.

This is the latest phase of our five-year restoration and conservation project from with Groundwork NE & Cumbria, The Wild Oyster Project: Tyne and Wear - which aims to bolster the health and resilience of the region by improving water quality, boosting biodiversity and providing nursery habitats for fish and other species.

More than 12,000 images were entered in the 2026 British Wildlife Photography Awards, which celebrate the variety, beauty and resilience of nature across the UK. The winning images range from familiar to overlooked forms of life, revealing behaviour, colour and texture in gardens, forests, rivers and coastal waters. Ben Lucas was named Young British Wildlife Photographer of the Year for his tender portrait of a mute swan cygnet asleep on its sibling. Together, the images offer a joyful record of Britain’s wildlife and a reminder of fragile habitats on which it depends.

New findings from the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) highlight how 25 years of annual monitoring, backed by the long-running MarClim project are providing unprecedented insight into the impacts of climate change on the UK’s coastal and intertidal habitats.

Long-term observations of rocky shore species are revealing clear, biological responses to a warming marine climate. Warm-water species are expanding their leading range limits to higher latitudes around the UK coastline, whilst the population abundances of cold-water species are declining in parts of their historic range, and retractions of the trailing range limits being recorded for some species in southwest England.

At the heart of this evidence is the Marine Biodiversity & Climate Change Project (MarClim) programme, one of the UK’s longest-running marine climate change monitoring initiatives. Although continuous annual surveys have been conducted at 100 sites around the UK since 2002, the dataset stretches back to the 1950s, providing an exceptionally rare record of ecological change over more than eight decades.

A bird reserve, where a devastating wildfire started, said visitor numbers have fallen by 20% since it reopened.

The fire, which started on 29 July, caused huge damage to Dunwich Heath but is believed to have started at neighbouring RSPB Minsmere.

Minsmere reopened over a week later and figures from the RSPB show over a thousand fewer visitors came to the site between 11-31 August than during the same period the year before.

Some of Wales' most endangered species are "at risk of vanishing" from an area of the country's largest national park, experts have warned.

The National Trust said Nant Ffrancon, a valley in Eryri National Park, was facing "serious ecological decline" with some species in danger of disappearing altogether, including the mountain blackbird and the mountain finch.

Now, a new £1m scheme is aiming to restore and conserve more than 4,000 acres of habitats at Eryri, also known as Snowdonia.

Following widespread public outcry over the revelation that sea eagles in Britain were being poisoned by toxic rat poisons, a Wales-based research group has called on the Senedd’s Environment Committee to push for tighter restrictions on the use of poisons which go on to enter the food chain.

Wildlife Poisoning Research UK (WPRUK) investigates the illegal and secondary poisoning of wild birds and animals in England and Wales.

WPRUK argue that currently anyone can go into a shop or use the internet to buy amateur use poisons with no questions asked, no training required and no need to follow any safety codes. There is also a complete lack of any meaningful investigation scheme when these poisons kill wildlife.

Supporters of a plan to reintroduce beavers to a county say they could help landscapes become more resilient to drought and climate change.

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust and Forestry England are surveying different parts of the county to assess their suitability for a new reintroduction programme.

"Beavers are a keystone species" said Emily Bowen of the Beaver Trust. "They are ecosystem engineers, which means that they can have a massive impact on the landscape around them."

The Wildlife Trusts are leading the largest coordinated recovery effort ever undertaken for the species. The programme unites around 40 partner organisations. It brings together conservation organisations, researchers and environmental agencies. The aim is simple - to reverse the dramatic loss of the UK's only native freshwater crayfish.

Threats to the species include the deterioration of habitat and increased pollution. The spread of invasive non-native American signal crayfish has also destroyed native crayfish populations. The signal crayfish carry and spread crayfish plague, which is fatal to white-claws. White-claws are key river ecosystem engineers, recycling dead matter and improving water quality. They also play an important role in river ecosystems as a food source for otter, heron and eel, while young crayfish provide food for brown trout and salmon.

Dedicated conservation efforts are helping to safeguard populations in Staffordshire and neighbouring areas. However, a coordinated national response is needed to recover their population at scale. This programme is supported by funding from Natural England’s Species Recovery Programme and matched by substantial contributions from project partners. The initiative will scale up nature recovery efforts for the benefit of white-clawed crayfish and river systems alike.