The National Trust’s "Tools to Realise Socio-Economic Benefits from Floodplains Under Restoration" (TREASURE) project has won one of The Open University’s Open Societal Challenges (OSC) Challenge Us! competition funding awards for 2024. We reported this in our last newsletter here.
We are delighted to say we are progressing with this project and it looks set to deliver perhaps even more than we had hoped. As a bonus, we have now appointed two interns to help with the project - hopefully both getting a step up into a future career at the same time. We have one intern who will be helping with the botanical survey work, and a second who will be looking at NT collections data to see if there are objects that relate to meadows.
Our survey programme, which has just started, is aiming to visit at least 18 National Trust properties looking at both existing floodplain meadows and sites with potential for restoration, starting off in Norfolk this week.
Our collections work is going to focus around objects related to the National Trust's Attingham Park where there is already floodplain meadow restoration being carried out and some interesting objects in the collections relating to floodplain meadows. Our intern will also be scouring the National Trust database across the country to see what else can be found. One of the project outputs will be a video showing relevant objects, the meadows and the National Trust staff involved in the work. This will be hosted at Attingham for visitors to enjoy. We hope this sparks similar interest in other properties across the National Trust estate. The links between land management, nature and cultural history are completely intertwined, but are not always evident. We think now is a time to bring them more to the fore.
We will report the final outcomes from this project in our Autumn newsletter.
