Biodiversity

During the winter the Landscape and Grounds Team carry out rotational coppicing. You can read more about that in our blog. The practice of coppicing does not kill the tree, with the stumps regrowing. Coppicing supports the health of our woodlands, and by increasing the diversity of light levels across our woodlands we can increase the diversity of vegetation that is able to grow on our woodland floors.

The Landscape and Grounds team manage our grasslands in a variety of ways, including different frequencies of mowing. You can see our grassland management map in our strategy appendices. We take part in No Mow May each Spring, adding more and more amenity lawns (lawns that would traditionally be mown regularly) each year.

We have trialled a variety of different meadow seed mixes and methodologies and are putting together our plans for a wildflower meadow on the Southern Slopes.

We currently use glyphosate as a herbicide on the hardstanding areas of campus and around the sports facilities. We have a year-on-year reduction target that is monitored by the Biodiversity Working Group. We ultimately want to remove its use on this from campus, however, the Landscape and Grounds teams have trialled other methods of weed removal and these have not been successful or efficient enough. 

We are removing the usage of this chemical from central campus as part of a two-year trial to see how weed growth responds, adapt out maintenance schedules and see what people's responses are to seeing more weeds around.

Ponds do naturally dry out and this can be a good thing for the health of a pond, as a way of eradicating disease or an invasive species. However, some of our ponds are drying out very regularly. 

This is partly due to the changing climate, however, many of our ponds contain an artificial liner, these are now failing after decades in place. We are seeking funding to restore some of our amenity ponds which rely on liners to hold water. We would be looking to install natural clay liners rather than plastic. 

Due to water conservation, we cannot fill ponds with potable water during dry spells. 

We love to see students and staff using the natural spaces as a living laboratory! 

Your research will likely need ethics approval through your School first. Once you have that, please get in touch with us at sustainability@kent.ac.uk as we can advise on logistics, security and safety of any equipment that needs to be left out as part of your research as well as advising on lone working policies, SafeZone and other relevant information. We can also liaise with Estates colleagues so that everyone that needs to know about your project has the right information.

We will also share any existing information, research, survey results etc that we have with you that are of relevance to your area of study.

Once you have completed your research, we would love if you could share your results with us, so we can learn more about the campus and use this to improve how we manage the natural spaces.

Yellow-legged (Asian) hornets are an invasive predatory species that has the potential to cause significant loss to our native bee species. If you think you have seen one on campus or beyond please report all possible sightings. Here's a website with guidance on how to report (Non Native Species Secretariat) as well as how to identify (YouTube video).

We manage a very small amount of green space at the Medway campus which limits what we can do. We will be publishing our new Landscape and Biodiversity Strategy in Summer 2025, which outlines our bottom line landscaping principles. These will be applied to both campuses and are designed to reduce our impact and enhance all green spaces for biodiversity. We will update this page with a link to the strategy when it is live.