Gatwick Airport, its boundaries and our two main zones of conservation
focus
Gatwick Airport is its own thriving town or city; just ask
anyone who works here. It also happens to be an island surrounded by the
beautiful Sussex and Surrey countryside; a very rare position for such a large
specimen of airport... If you take an OS map you may be surprised by the amount
of undeveloped land which exists here, also the number of public footpaths
passing through habitats such as woodland, grassland, floodplain meadow and
wild ponds. With such a range of habitats the resulting variety of wildlife is
quite astounding, and seemingly unperturbed by busy air traffic. I am
continually updating Gatwick’s wildlife records database which we began in
summer 2012 (anyone who enjoys a spot of data entry do drop me a line) and I am
excitedly anticipating what we might find each season. These records are shared
with our local biodiversity record centres which collectively hold copious
information on the species and habitats of the UK.
River Mole North of the runway
Our ultimate goal is to protect and improve what we can in
terms of the existing natural habitats and species diversity on Gatwick
landholdings. Over the decades Gatwick Airport has become ever busier, but
equally people have been working ever harder to preserve its greener zones.
Thanks largely to volunteers from the Gatwick Greenspace Partnership, the
British Airways Engineering volunteers, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, helpful
individual naturalists and the companies JS Agriculture Ltd and Ecology and
Habitat Management Ltd, we are now making a concerted combined effort to achieve
The Wildlife Trust’s Biodiversity Benchmark Award.
Grassland and
woodland habitat along the River Mole
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