Every year, Surrey Wildlife Trust provides projects for the SATRO Research Work Placement scheme, producing some fantastic results. SATRO organise research placements for students aged 16+ to undertake a genuine STEM (Science, Technology, Maths and Engineering) based research project, working within an employer or academic research environment. The placement runs for four weeks during the Summer, enabling students to work alongside qualified professionals and experts. 

This summer we worked with two students, Priya and Ellen, on two very different projects. They both presented their work at our staff meeting and have done some great research for us to learn from!

Barriers to Youth Engagement with Nature

Priya completed a project looking at the different barriers that today's youth find that stop them spending time in natural spaces and engaging with local wildlife. She found that, overwhelmingly, people between 16-24 felt that they didn't have enough time and that the various academic and social pressures they felt took priority. Some young people, particularly women, also felt that they didn't feel safe visiting nature reserves. To encourage youth people to spend more time outdoors Priya designed a Geo-Caching App and presented it to a focus group of her peers. They concluded it was an engaging, but short term solution to the problem. Together, they discussed the idea of a Youth Council to provide a long term fix that went beyond the trends. Surrey Wildlife Trust hopes to take some of Priya's ideas forward into ways we can improve our engagement with 16-24 year olds.

A Case Study for Green Infrastructure Solutions in Woking

Ellen completed a project to research and design Green Infrastructure solutions to be implemented in Woking town centre. She discovered the wide reaching benefits of having Green Infrastructure in urban and semi-urban areas, ranging from biodiversity and climate change to health and economic. When she visited Woking, Ellen chose to focus on a central area stretching from the WWF centre, past the council building into a covered shopping area. This captured a variety of places with existing Green Infrastructure and places which had huge opportunities for it to be implemented. Ellen designed conservative and ambitious scenarios for 3 areas of central Woking, the illustrations for these are in the gallery below. Surrey Wildlife Trust plans to share her work with Woking Borough Council to encourage them to put some of these ideas in action.

If you would like to find out more about our work with SATRO or are interested in doing a research project yourself, drop our Research and Monitoring team an email (ben.siggery@surreywt.org.uk) or find out more on our new Research and Monitoring page!