Natural History Lives

Date and time: Tuesday 6th October 2026, 1pm – 2pm

Beetles (Coleoptera) play a vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems, acting as decomposers, predators, and pollinators. Understanding their diversity is essential for conservation and assessing ecosystem health. Yet, despite their importance, beetles remain one of the most understudied groups in the UK—largely due to their immense diversity perceived steep learning curve for beginners and huge range of literature.

This free-to-attend webinar is designed to help those starting out in UK Coleoptera studies navigate the wide range of literature and identification resources available.

What you’ll learn

This webinar will provide guidance on which tools may be useful at different stages of learning, Whether you’re a beginner or looking for the most cost effective way to improve studies, this session will give you an insight to make your beetle studies more effective and rewarding.

This webinar will include: 

• An overview of literature and resources available to aid with UK beetle identification.
• Examples of different types of identification resources.
• Key considerations to make when selecting beetle literature.

The tutor

Dan Asaw leads the Biodiversity Training Programme Team, creating dynamic learning resources across a range of natural history subjects. But his true passion? Beetles. With over a decade of studying UK Coleoptera in his spare time, Dan has taught numerous beetle courses, including family identification at Liverpool Museum. His mission: make beetle identification accessible and exciting for everyone.

Steve is a Resource Development Officer with Field Studies Council Publications. He is also an active biological recorder in his spare time with an eclectic mix of interests including fungi, birds and invertebrates, especially beetles. Steve is particularly interested in the development of resources that enable the accurate and rapid identification of species. He enjoys working with specialists and artists to capture knowledge and make it available to a wider audience.

Date and time: Tuesday 24th November 2026, 7pm – 8pm

Discover how large-scale nature recovery is being put into practice at Hepple Wilds, an ambitious rewilding initiative in Northumberland. This free webinar offers an inspiring introduction to the project, exploring how a working landscape is being transformed to support wildlife, natural processes, and long-term ecological resilience.

Through an overview of the site, you’ll learn how Hepple Wilds is combining ecological restoration with innovative land management. The session will highlight the vision behind the project and the practical steps being taken to allow nature to recover at scale.

What you’ll learn

By taking a closer look at the development of Hepple Wilds, we will explore the progress made so far, including habitat changes, species responses, and the reintroduction of natural processes. We’ll also discuss some of the key challenges faced along the way, from land management decisions to balancing conservation goals with real-world constraints.

Finally, you’ll gain insight into the successes and lessons learned from the project, and how these can inform wider rewilding efforts across the UK. Whether you’re new to rewilding or already engaged in conservation, this session will provide a valuable look at how landscape-scale recovery can be achieved in practice.

This webinar will cover: 

• An overview of the Hepple Wilds project and its vision
• Progress and ecological changes observed on site
• Challenges, successes, and lessons learned in rewilding initiatives

About the tutor

Richard Thompson has worked as an ecologist and wildlife guide across the Northern UK for the past 8 years. He is currently part of the team at the Hepple Wilds rewilding project in Northumberland, which manages over 4,000 acres of habitat including former grouse moorland, blanket bog, woodlands, wetlands and mixed field systems with natural grazing regimes.

Date and time: Thursday 5th November 2026, 1pm – 2pm

Coding might seem worlds away from field studies, species recording, ecology and environmental science, but it is increasingly shaping how we understand and manage the natural world. From analysing wildlife tracking data and processing satellite imagery to modelling climate change and automating repetitive tasks, coding has become a powerful tool for researchers and practitioners alike. This one-hour session will explore why people choose to learn to code, how it is used in real-world environmental and geographical work, and why even complete beginners can develop programming skills.

What you’ll learn

This session will introduce the role of coding in field studies and environmental research, highlighting practical examples rather than technical jargon. You’ll discover how coding helps scientists collect, manage and analyse large datasets, create maps and visualisations, and answer both simple and complex research questions. We’ll discuss the different types of problems coding can solve, the skills employers increasingly value, and how learning even a little programming can open new opportunities in research, conservation, sustainability and beyond. Whether you’re curious, sceptical or considering learning to code yourself, this talk will offer insights into why coding has become such an important skill.

This webinar will cover: 

• What coding is
• Advantages over using existing software
• Examples of coding in field studies and environmental science
• Mapping, visualisation and communicating results
• Beginner friendly routes into learning coding

About the tutor

Damien Hicks has spent 25 years surveying and identifying species in the field, followed by the analysis and modelling of those data in the lab. His favourite parts of this work are joining international expeditions and collaborating with research teams from across the academic, public and private sector. Current projects include spatial epidemiology of species records, DNA identification of pests and pathogens, and time series modelling of tens of millions of rows of species data.