The client

The Darent Nature Partnership, a collaboration between twenty landowners across the Darent Valley — including local farmers, councils, and Kent Wildlife Trust — who have together committed more than 1,800 hectares of land to long-term nature restoration.

The challenge

The Partnership was formed with a shared ambition to protect, restore, and enhance the River Darent and its surrounding landscape, while delivering wider benefits such as reduced flood risk, sustainable water supply, and the preservation of the area's rich heritage. Achieving this at landscape scale, across twenty separate landholdings, required coordinated land management advice and a robust evidence base to guide decisions and unlock funding for restoration.

What we did

Adonis Blue Environmental Consultants has been involved in the project since the start, carrying out Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) assessments in 2023 and 2024. This included providing land management advice, delivering talks to landowners, and supplying Habitat Management and Monitoring Plans (HMMPs). In 2024, we also began multi-taxa wildlife monitoring within the Darent Valley, which allowed us to assess not only the current habitats but also the species using them. This involved deploying AudioMoths to record bat and bird calls (identifying species from their calls), slam traps for invertebrate studies, and camera traps to monitor which larger mammals were using the Darent Valley day to day.

The outcome achieved

Our ongoing BNG assessments and land management advice have supported landowners across the Partnership in making evidence-based decisions for restoration on their land. The introduction of multi-taxa wildlife monitoring in 2024 has built a much fuller picture of the wildlife currently using the Darent Valley, from bats and birds to invertebrates and larger mammals, giving the Partnership a stronger baseline from which to track progress and target future habitat creation and enhancement.

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Throughout 2023 and 2024, ABEC have been working tirelessly alongside Kent Wildlife Trust, South East Rivers Trust, and other amazing partners to create, plan,…