Our monitoring efforts encompass the core from which London HogWatch has evolved. With expertise in estimating wildlife densities, we conduct camera trap surveys to provide important empirical evidence for our local stakeholders across London.

Working with environmental groups, local governments and businesses, these surveys help us to identify where hedgehogs are present, and potentially absent, from local green spaces. We can then determine areas of improvement, such as increasing hedgehog habitat or connectivity initiatives. Critical to understanding how effective such conservation measures are, we work with partners on a long-term basis to gather information to assess population and distribution changes over time.

See our Projects page for more information.

This element of our work describes how we work with, and importantly connect, various hedgehog initiatives across London to bring together conservation groups. It also encompasses our efforts to connect green spaces across London to lessen the effects of habitat fragmentation, as we believe this is one of the largest threats they face in the urban landscape.

For example, we’ve worked with local environmental groups Barnes Hedgehogs, Heath Hands, Ealing Wildlife Group and Wild Chiswick on their hedgehog highways projects. These projects have been creating corridors through engaging the community and council, drilling holes and creating habitat. We provided vital data, as well as conservation expertise, helping these projects to be targeted and more effective.

Working in the urban environment, connecting people is key to connecting hedgehogs. Therefore, this element also describes how we support these group by connecting them to facilitate sharing their experiences and learnings with each other. Along with Hedgehog Street we are working to coordinate a network of London-based projects and organisations who are working for the benefit of hedgehogs.

Our engagement activities are a vital element of our work, as our monitoring isn’t useful unless we can actively engage with communities to feedback our results and insights. This is also how we can educate, inspire and bring awareness to people about hedgehog conservation. Previously, one of the key engagement activities we’ve focused on is feeding back to communities where we’ve surveyed. This is crucial to educate the public about the wildlife in their area, offer advice, and inspire positive action for hedgehog conservation, such as hedgehog highways.

In more recent years, we’ve focused on expanding our outreach to engage more diverse audiences across a wide range of ages and environments. For example, we’ve taken part in festivals and exhibitions, hosted work experience placements for traditionally underserved and underrepresented students, and taken part in the Refugia project - which works to engage asylum seekers and refugees with conservation. We’ve also delivered outreach through the ZSL Access Scheme, which involves engaging local schools and colleges with work being undertaken at ZSL.

The majority of our scientific research is underpinned by our camera trap monitoring data, which is now extensive due to being obtained over nine years of the project. These long-term datasets have produced invaluable findings by increasing our understanding of hedgehogs and other species across London.

Collaborations with master’s students and our 3 PhD students has also resulted in multiple outputs which have been published. For example, Dr Jessica Turner (a previous PhD student) and Uva Yu Yang Fung have produced papers on habitat suitability of hedgehogs, foxes, and badgers across London using citizen science data. Dr Ben Evans has advanced our technological developments and, along with new computing resources, has also massively improved our capacity to utilise AI tools to help us process data more quickly and scale up our survey efforts.

See our Research page for more details.