Evaluation

Our targets

Our main target has been to create a community nature reserve the size of a football pitch. That is, an area approximately equal to 5000 square yards. We aimed to achieve that target by encouraging 1666 people from the Felixstowe area to allocate at least 3 square yards of their gardens for wildlife-friendly features such as pollinator-friendly plants, hedgehog homes, insect hotels, ponds and bird feeders. We aimed to achieve the 5000 square yard area within 5 years of our project start date on 11th May 2015.

Evaluation

At the time of writing, we have 1,624 active members. Each member has allocated an average of 3.65 square yards of their gardens for the type of wildlife-friendly features described in our targets above. Overall, we therefore estimate that Felixstowe's Community Nature Reserve has created about 5,927 square yards of new, sustainable,  wildlife-friendly habitat. This represents 118.5% of our target.

As a further method of evaluation, we used the Ten Principles for Best Practice in Citizen Science, as published by the European Citizen Science Association. The results of that evaluation were published on 8 August 2018 on this website under our Data Analysis section. They were also  shared through Facebook and Twitter.