Published 10th Jul 2026, 11:45 BST
Species including curlew, lapwing, and water voles are all under pressure from increased footfall.
“I’ve been working with the Wildlife Trust for a couple of years now, and we’ve been looking at some various different sites,” says Liam Healy from the University of Sheffield’s School of Architecture, who is working on the project.
“I think there was a general concern from the Wildlife Trust that since vovid, a lot of their sites have become a lot busier, and that has created additional pressures on the sites from more people visiting.
“I’m really interested in questions around access, and research on trust. I’m interested in this tension between increasing access, but also how that can impact wildlife, water quality, things like that.
Mr Healy’s work will eventually aim to produce guidance on how natural sites can welcome the public into locations of importance or natural vulnerability without putting the wildlife and environment at risk.
Current work has focussed on Redmires Reservoirs, in Sheffield, looking at wildlife including ground nesting birds. Impacts from increased human activity on such sites include the disturbance of bird nests from dog walkers, which can lead to birds not returning to previously used locations.
The scheme plans to expand from Redmires later in the year.
As well as an impact on wildlife, Mr Healy is also looking into why people commit acts of vandalism at sites such as Redmires. This includes graffiti on information boards designed to inform visitors about local wildlife.
“There isn’t an obvious answer,” says Mr Healy, when asked why such acts occur.
“Something that we’re finding that’s beginning to emerge is the role of stories and storytelling on a site. We’ve been looking at who is seen as the antagonist, or who is seen as the hero, and the more you speak to different people, the more you find that those roles get a bit mixed up.
“We’re interested in these roles within the idea of environmental storytelling, looking at who are those characters, and how do we use them to make sense of landscape and what people do there, and how do we use them to justify certain behaviors?”
One of the ways the researchers are looking to potentially change how people interact with natural spaces is through looking at their relationship with them.
The group recently held a workshop at Redmires Reservoirs where participants were given professional sound recording equipment and asked to map what they hear. The idea behind the activity was that actively listening to a place changes how you relate to it and how you treat it.
“A lot of the species that reside at Redmires, or migrate through, you often can’t see,” says Mr Healy.
“It might be ground nesting birds that are embedded in the undergrowth, and you don’t necessarily see them, but you can hear them, and so there’s something exciting about activating that sensory perception. Our speculation is that by fostering these more close, deeper, more empathetic relationships, there’s a twofold payoff.”
“From the human perspective, you can have a really rich, exciting, interesting experience on that site, and by being attentive and by caring for that site, you can potentially see an increase in biodiversity.”
The next event held by the group will be an online sound editing workshop run with a local sound artist, designed to take sounds from Redmires and create a piece which could build connections between the site and people who have never even visited.
Mr Healy is also looking into such issues from a design perspective, researching how infrastructure in natural places can affect how people interact with them.
“The dream question to answer, I think, is how do you access with care and with responsibility,” he says.
“When you know what’s there, and when you know what your actions are doing for a space. I think it’s a really kind of enriching way of engaging with a landscape and with a place. Thinking about how design might mediate that, or encourage different things, that is the question for me.”
