My favourite thing about Knepp is the general soundscape here.
It feels wild, and I just love being amongst the scrub, love being amongst the insects and the birds
and just enjoying the sounds of it all going on around me.
Just a stone's throw from the Museum, in West Sussex,
is an exciting and innovative conservation project that is doing things just that little bit differently.
Having come from traditional conservation and then coming to Knepp
I'm just filled with so much hope
where there's so much doom and gloom in our environment in the news at the moment.
And I'm really passionate about what's happening here,
and I love sharing what we're learning because it gives other people hope as well.
And it shows that in just a very short amount of time, we can see a huge turnaround in fortunes of a bit of land
that can go from a degraded farm to the most wonderful wildlife habitat
that's absolutely exploding with different species that are turning up every day.
The project is pioneering rewilding.
The spark for which came in response to an unprofitable farm and declining biodiversity.
Biodiversity is the diversity of life on Earth and it is declining globally.
Now in the UK, biodiversity's in a particularly sorry state, so it's at about 53% when we're thinking about
the health of our natural systems and that's in the bottom 10% of countries.
Alongside climate change, one of the biggest causes of biodiversity loss is land use change.
By destroying natural forests and grasslands and intensifying our agricultural systems, we're leaving less space for wildlife.
This is where Knepp is doing things differently by handing the landscape back to nature.
Created by Charles Burrell and Isabella Tree, the 3,500-acre estate
was first turned over to nature in 2001 after decades of unprofitable farming on heavy clay soils.
Over the subsequent few decades, they have set about restoring the landscape's rich biodiversity
by removing drainage ditches and fencing,
restoring natural water courses,
and introducing free-roaming herbivores.
It is now one of the largest and most pioneering rewilding projects in the UK.
The main drivers for the rewilding project are the large herbivores that we have here.
So we have fallow deer and red deer and roe deer here as well.
We've got Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies and the lovely old English longhorn cattle.
And the idea is that they're all bringing something different to the project,
different ways of feeding, different ways of moving around and the disturbance that they cause.
And that goes on to make wonderful habitat for other wildlife.
So we've got open pastures, we've got scrublands coming up and little coppices of trees coming up as well.
So we have this nice variety of different habitats altogether
and lots of edge habitat, where one merges into the next, and that's the important bit for wildlife.
Instead of using more traditional methods of conservation management
which can focus on restoring and conserving habitats with specific species in mind,
Knepp has taken a more hands-off approach.
By encouraging nature to naturally take over the landscape, and restoring natural ecological processes,
the estate has seen an extraordinary revival of many nationally rare and declining species.
We've got some wonderful wildlife success stories here.
Everything from the bat species that we're finding here and the abundance of bats,
especially on the river restoration, which is just behind me here.
We're finding grass snakes and slow worms coming back in great numbers.
Grasshoppers, crickets, insects generally, you can hear the thrum of insects
as you're walking around these fields at this time of year in the summer.
We've got turtle doves doing really well. It's a red list bird that's in a 98% decline elsewhere
and we're seeing big numbers of them here.
Nightingales and other scrub-nesting birds.
And also migrating birds as they're coming through in the autumn
have got lots of berries and insects to be feeding on in the scrub as well.
So we're seeing these really lovely groups of wildlife coming back
and doing their thing, and it feels like this is how it should be.
It feels this is right, you know, this is working, this is a working ecosystem.
Here the focus of rewilding is mostly about creating habitats
and restoring processes that provide opportunities for wildlife to return
and monitoring the landscape to see what turns up.
However, if you look closely enough there are a few exceptions.
We have a white stork reintroduction project here,
which is a big partnership project, which is just doing so well.
It's, you know, been even better than our wildest dreams, really.
This year we fledged 19 young from nests that the white storks have built themselves in oak trees here,
which is the most wonderful thing to see.
And that was all about getting people excited about big fauna in our landscape again,
living alongside people, and villages, and towns.
We also have beavers on site, which is the most wonderful thing,
and especially at the moment where we're in, you know, quite a drought and they've got a lovely bit of wetland they've created.
They've been here since February, so the last few months
they've been busy building dams and holding back water
and, you know, we've seen instant results with that.
The wildlife has flooded back into that area as well.
Dragonflies, reed warblers, all sorts of things coming back to that lovely beaver enclosure.
So fingers crossed, in the long term we can start thinking about releasing them onto the wider catchment.
That would be our dream.
The value of creating such biodiverse habitats goes far beyond beautiful countryside.
It's a hugely important resource for scientific research
which here at the Museum, and across many other institutions,
is helping us to understand more about nature,
past, present and future, in the face of an increasing climate emergency.
Projects like this, where we're allowing the land to recover and nature to move back in,
it's really important to monitor those sites and get that data.
Because at the Natural History Museum we've got loads of information from historical sites,
but we're not just about understanding the past.
We also need to know how things are changing now in order to predict how they might change in the future.
Predicting how biodiversity is going to change in the future
is only useful if that information is in the hands of people who are making decisions.
So we've developed a tool called the Biodiversity Trends Explorer,
where we show policymakers and the public, whoever is interested,
how biodiversity might change in the future under different scenarios
so governments can see are they reaching their targets that they've set for biodiversity.
How can they change the way that they're managing the land around them
in order to meet those targets more quickly.
Knepp's transformation from intensive farmland to ambitious rewilding project has become a model of success
and is now inspiring similar projects around the world.
By continuing to engage future generations of farmers, scientists, policymakers and the public,
Knepp proves that we can all work together to support biodiversity and nature
and leave behind a future that will continue to thrive.
If we expand that kind of work, if we work together
and try to balance human needs with nature, we can move forward into a safer, more equitable and healthier world.
There's so many amazing rewilding projects coming online now.
Regenerative farming pitching in on that as well and other conservation projects
that are taking elements of rewilding and running with it.
So we're part of this huge wave of enthusiasm that's going on
and rewilding is happening on a large scale across our landscape now.
And hopefully we're going to be able to start joining up with nature reserves, thinking on a landscape scale
and thinking how wildlife can move through that landscape
amongst people, and towns, and rivers, and regenerative farming,
and how we can be productive, but also be really good for wildlife as well.
I think it's a really super exciting time for nature conservation and rewilding is sort of leading the way.