A Day in the Life of a Landscape Ecologist: Leanne Sargeant

Our first ‘day in the life’ feature for the new Landscape Ecology UK website features Leanne Sargeant, Senior Ecologist at Forestry England and a member of the Landscape Ecology UK committee.

Leanne in the New Forest

Tell us about a typical day in your work life?

I know it’s a cliché but I don’t have a typical day for which I am very grateful. I get to spend a mix of my time out in our forests and that is countered by quite a lot of meetings and mostly on teams these days!  My role at Forestry England is to support all the teams from recreation to harvesting in delivering their works in a way that ensures we stay within the wildlife legislation but also helps enhance and improve nature. I am lucky I get to be involved with lots of innovative projects too and over the last few years we have won the River Restoration Centre award for wetland restoration in the New Forest and I worked closely with the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation to restore White-tailed Eagles to southern England via the Isle of Wight project. I am still involved in both these exciting projects as I support our habitat restoration team in restoring the New Forest and my staff members run the White-tailed Eagle project on the island. I have a large patch to cover which stretches from Dorchester to Dorking along the south coast and has over 46,000ha of forests.

What (or who) got you involved in landscape ecology?

I think it happened by osmosis. I was a land manager for the wildlife trusts when I first heard people talking about landscape scale ecology in the conservation sector and I could see that what we had been doing throughout the 1990’s by creating nature reserves wasn’t working to save our wildlife. I felt like a window had been opened into a new world and that perhaps this was the way to save wildlife. I feel like we have a long way to go to make that happen but at least we are on the right path now.

What is your favourite UK landscape?

Well I have to say the New Forest because I moved down here to enjoy it. And now I am living and breathing it all the time, my partner and I both work in the New Forest and we are commoners so we have ponies that graze the forest helping create the structure and wildlife that I love. We have visited quite a number of the National Parks as some of our big landscapes but I think the New Forest will always have a special place in my heart. I was impressed when I visited De Biesbosch National Park in the Netherlands and also Oostvaarderplassen, although smaller scale than the New Forest, they have some broad views on landscape ecology.

How long have you been working in landscape ecology? I have been working in the sector for 23 years and been lucky to work for a variety of different bodies from charities and other NGO’s to now working for an arms length government body.

What are you working on at the moment, and where?

I have one big habitat restoration project in the planning stages at Wareham Forest where we are hoping to enter a Landscape Recovery Scheme with a number of neighbouring landowners to restore areas of heathland and wetland. If the opportunity arises for us to enter the New Forest into Landscape Recovery round 3 then that will be a big focus for my time at work. I also have a couple of other smaller landscape projects, one of which is on the Isle of Wight at approx. 400ha which we would like to restore to wood pasture and get grazing re-established.

What do you most enjoy about you work, on a day-to-day basis? I am really lucky that I enjoy my job, I think the best part is the freedom that Forestry England allow me to look at innovative projects and find ways of making them happen. A few years ago I got to visit northern Spain to hear about a landscape project  the EU were supporting and meet some Spanish commoners. It was fascinating to hear about the issues facing their community and strangely reassuring to discover that commoners are the same around the world. I even got to visit their ponies and walk through their bogs which were under much the same pressures as our habitats with wind turbines built throughout, interrupting the peat.

What are the landscape ecology resources (e.g., a paper, website, tutorial or text book) that you couldn’t do without?

My peers are so supportive of the work we do here in Forestry England and we all share ideas and inspiration and without that there wouldn’t be the innovation. I think it is so important to find people to work with who stretch your capacity and thinking.

What advice would you give to anyone considering a career in landscape ecology? It’s a super opportunity to be involved in some very innovative work. There is still so much to learn and so much to deliver to really make a difference for nature. We need to find a sustainable way to live on our small island alongside nature and landscape ecology can help us on that journey.