Kerry People Asked To Pledge Action To Help Pollinators And Biodiversity

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Members of the ‘From The Ground Up’ network launching the campaign on Monday at Tralee Bay Wetlands.

A NETWORK of community groups taking action to enhance biodiversity from all over Kerry, is inviting gardeners and others to pledge and register the great work taking place in gardens and grasslands throughout the county for the benefit of our local pollinators and biodiversity.

‘From the Ground Up’ is a network of over 60 different community groups, tidy towns groups and individuals supported by Transition Kerry and the Kerry PPN, which formed after the highly successful Transition Kerry Biodiversity & Climate Change Community Leadership course which concluded in 2022.

The network has been collaborating on a wide variety of environmental projects and initiatives – from a 3-day Celebration of Biodiversity, Leadership and Community Wellbeing last October; to several tree-planting meitheals; to a pilot survey on awareness of the value of the areas managed for biodiversity in Tralee town in conjunction with Tralee Tidy Towns and MTU Kerry Business Students.

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The insights from a personal survey which was piloted with 87 respondents, revealed a largely positive sentiment towards the areas managed for biodiversity in Tralee once the reasons for the reduced mowing regimes were explained.

Over one third of respondents were already taking action to protect biodiversity in their own gardens and half of respondents were considering taking some action for the benefit of pollinators.

This project has inspired the From the Ground Up team to launch a campaign urging Kerry gardeners, communities, businesses, schools and farmers to register these actions by taking the following steps:

• visit the website of the National Biodiversity Centre mapping system on https://pollinators.biodiversityireland.ie/,
• sign up for an account (use a pseudonym if preferred), and once you sign in to your account,
• map your area and actions by selecting ‘Manage My Site’

Brendan O’Brien, Chair of Tralee Tidy Towns said: “we must congratulate the MTU students who engaged with us and took this project so seriously. The research has really underlined the fact that when people understand that these seemingly un-mowed areas are allowing endangered wildflowers and birds to survive, they’re much more accepting of them. We now have a great project idea for the Biodiversity category of the National Tidy Towns competition and we’d like to see all those who are doing this great work for pollinators in our town to register their actions online.”

According to Niamh Ní Dhúill of From the Ground Up: “’Actions for Pollinators’ is an online mapping system that allows everyone – gardeners, farmers, Councils, businesses, local communities , and schools to register the actions they have taken for pollinators and put their pollinator-friendly locations on the map. If everyone maps their actions (even anonymously), we can begin to have a fuller picture of the wide-ranging work going on in Kerry to protect our wildlife.  We can also start to identify wildlife corridors which help wildlife such as birds, bees and butterflies to traverse busy urban areas safely.”

Anne Marie Fuller of the Kerry PPN said: “The Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss showed us that when people are fully informed of the merit of the actions required to protect biodiversity, they are very supportive of them. What will be important in the response to the biodiversity crisis is to encourage multi-stakeholder actions and this mapping tool by the national biodiversity centre is the perfect place to capture it and monitor our progress as a county. The Kerry PPN, through our engagement with 900+ member groups, will assist in supporting this project and biodiversity throughout Kerry.”

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