Network components
INPUTS
National coordination
In Wales the national coordination is based on the government's draft action plan for pollinators. The aim of this plan is to reduce, and seek to reverse, the decline in wild and managed pollinator populations.Wild pollinators, which include bumblebees and butterflies, are also important pollinators for crops like fruit and oil seed rape, for clovers, which help to improve pastures for livestock grazing and wild flowers. They contribute to the diversity of plant species, habitats and wildlife. This provides food, makes Wales a better place for people to enjoy and visit and contributes to the national economy. It is part of the government's Cynefin scheme which aims to coordinate funding of place betterment stakeholder initiatives. The other government strategic component is a programme funded through the Rural Development Plan for Wales. It is called Tyfu Pobl (Growing People) and is delivered through the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens.
Local gardening hub
In Wales the the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens supports and advises both existing and emerging community growing projects, enabling the sharing and transfer of best practice information, knowledge and skills. Tyfu Pobl supports a variety of community growing models including: community farms/ gardens/ orchards, allotments, community supported agriculture and community-managed market gardens. These are the local community gardening hubs, which can deliver plants and capacity building necessary to establish neighbourhood nectar points to deliver various outcomes.
http://www.farmgarden.org.uk/farms-gardens/your-region/wales/543-wales-news-a-events
Third sector support
The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens is an example of the many voluntary and community organisations, volunteering bodies, charities, social enterprises as well as some co-operatives and mutuals with the aims of capacity building in communities. Many of them support schemes, such as the nectar point network for environmental betterment.
OUTCOMES
Increased urban biodiversity
The objective is to manage the entire urban territory including private gardens in need of management to increase its biodiversity not just the bits labelled nature conservation. The development of habitat networks is widely seen as a key mechanism for reversing the effects of urban fragmentation on biodiversity, while delivering a range of other social and environmental benefits such as enhancement of local landscape character and greater opportunities for public access and recreational use.
http://biodiversitywales.org.uk/en-GB/Citizen-Science
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news/news_archive/documents/guidetocitizenscience_version2_interactiveweb.pdf
Neighbourhood forums
An on line neighbourhood biodiversity forum provides opportunities for like-minded individuals to share information and express ideas around the biodiversity of their particular square mile and its conservation management. It also serves as an arena to showcase good practice, share examples of important and interesting biodiversity-related projects and opens up opportunities for networking and collaboration between organisations, allowing for their work to be enhanced and strengthened through the establishment of partnerships. A major role for the forum would be to spread know how, ideas, and acheivements. A multi-authored citizen's insect e-book, part of a nature library, is being created for digital learning. This will contain classical commonplace accounts of insects, their ways with examples of how they have been celebrated in art and literature. The aim is to boost learning about this important group of animals and its importance to the concept of biodiversity. The forum would also support the application of citizen science to record local biodiversity and its management. Overall, a neighbourhood forum established along these lines would function as a record and an exemplar of what can be achieved.
Citizen science is about partnership- bringing together scientists, amateur recorders and local interest groups from a variety of backgrounds to observe and record the state of our environment. Over recent decades there has been a rapid increase in the diversity and scale of citizen science. Initiatives range from crowd sourcing activities, in which the time and effort of large numbers of people are used to solve a problem or analyse a large dataset, to small groups of volunteers, who are experts in their own right, collecting and analysing environmental data and sharing their findings. The range of possible approaches can be bewildering, but when it is planned and executed well, citizen science can increase scientific knowledge, raise people’s awareness of their environment and allow like-minded people to share enthusiasm and knowledge.
Like the countryside, cities and towns have their vantage points and question marks, particularly in relation to there being many points of view focussing on the design and management of urban landscapes. This idea has been conflated with the concept 'theatre’. The stage-like spaces between buildings, the complex scenic views are singled out to emphasise the multi-actor performative nature of the dynamic civic culture of commuters and residents, each with their own story to tell. Therefore, a neighborhood forum can be a theatre of memory and imagination, where knowledge of what it is like to live there can be envisaged as a landscape of stories and images. Here a geographical imagination enters explicitly into the very processes of education and learning for local action, not as a passive form of spectatorship, but an active one based on observation, speculation, and theorising. Such a forum and its network highlight place as a medium as well as an object of study. Nectar points are just one category of places and the nectar point forum functions for the presentation of geographical knowledge: as a library, a classroom, an essay, a book. These small places matter as much as larger places - the city, the village, the region - about which geography researches and teaches. They have their points of view and stimulate imagination in place.
http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/July-2013/Urban-Views/
http://www.geogspace.edu.au/verve/_resources/3.1.1_5_daniels_place_imagination.pdf