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Species Recovery Manager

Closing date:
Salary: Up to £39,000 per annum
Contract type: Fixed term / Working hours: Full time
This role is predominantly home-based with regular travel to locations across the UK. Office facilities are available at our Newark office (Tuesdays to Thursdays) for those within easy travelling distance.
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Do you think that something is missing in British wildlife? Do you envision a future for the UK’s landscapes where ecosystems are resilient to the effects of climate change through functioning natural processes driven by keystone species? A future where local people are in awe of the species returning to the wild places around them. Do you have the knowledge and passion to help drive this change? This may be the role for you.

For decades, Wildlife Trusts and other Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations (“eNGOs”) have worked tirelessly to conserve and restore precious habitats across the UK and whilst there are many examples of success, we have not managed to reverse the decline in wildlife. What is needed is far greater scale and restoration of processes that enable habitats to be managed more effectively with less human intervention. This requires the return of missing species to drive those ecological processes. This includes extensive grazing with large herbivores like bison and elk, plus cattle and ponies (as proxies for extinct aurochs and tarpan), reinstatement of predator prey relationships with wildcat, lynx and white tailed eagles plus a host of translocations at local scales to help occupy empty habitat niches and increase ecosystem complexity.

This post will work across teams within The Wildlife Trusts to support species reintroduction efforts, share best practice, develop new programmes and work towards species recovery being built into day-to-day conservation practices.

The Wildlife Trusts are a grassroots movement of people from a wide range of backgrounds and all walks of life, who believe that we need nature and nature needs us. We have more than 945,000 members, over 33,000 volunteers, 4,100 staff and 600 trustees. There are 46 individual Wildlife Trusts, each of which is a place-based independent charity with its own legal identity, formed by groups of people getting together and working with others to make a positive difference to wildlife and future generations, starting where they live and work.

Every Wildlife Trust is part of The Wildlife Trusts federation and a corporate member of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, a registered charity in its own right founded in 1912 and one of the founding members of IUCN – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Taken together this federation of 47 charities is known as The Wildlife Trusts.

The next few years will be critical in determining what kind of world we all live in. We need to urgently reverse the loss of wildlife and put nature into recovery at scale if we are to prevent climate and ecological disaster. We recognise that this will require big, bold changes in the way The Wildlife Trusts work, not least in how we mobilise others and support them to organise within their own communities.

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