Funded societies - OPAL Grants Scheme 2009

The recipients of OPAL's 2009 grants

Through the OPAL Grants Scheme in 2009, OPAL awarded 27 grants of between £500 and £2,000 to support the work of amateur natural history societies across the country.

The grants are being used in a variety of ways, from improving websites and buying new equipment to organising family days and conferences.

This page lists all the societies that benefited from the 2009 award scheme and briefly explains how they are spending their grant. See our case studies for a closer look at some of the projects we helped fund.

2009 case studies
Discover more about how OPAL grants helped the following societies

Interested in support for your society?
As well as small grants, OPAL also provides a range of support guides, and can offer publicity for your society at OPAL events.

Grants awarded by OPAL in 2009

Amateur Entomologists Society in partnership with the Tachinid Recording Scheme
Grant awarded: £2,000
Project: Buying new cabinets, drawers and unit trays to re-house the Tachinid Recording Scheme’s reference collection.
Website: www.tachinidae.org.uk.

Amateur Entomologists Society (AES)
Grant awarded: £800
Project: Supporting the AES’s Uncovering Insects project in celebration of its 75th year. The grant will pay for computer equipment to modernise membership handling, and banners for public events.
Website: www.amentsoc.org.

Auchenorrhyncha Recording Scheme
Grant awarded: £2,000
Project: Developing a new website for the recording scheme. Auchenorrhyncha are bugs (Hemiptera) that include the leafhoppers, froghoppers and cicadas.
Website: www.ledra.co.uk.

British Arachnological Society (BAS)
Grant awarded: £2,000
Project: Developing a recording scheme website for spiders, opiliones and pseudoscorpions. The site will include distribution maps, information on local sites and species of interest, and a forum so the public can post pictures and seek expert information.
Website: www.britishspiders.org.uk.

British Pteridological Society (BPS)
Grant awarded: £500
Project: Ferns and Fossils at Manchester Museum - a free family-friendly event to promote ferns and the work of the BPS. The day will include talks, living ferns and fossils from the museum’s collections, demonstrations on growing ferns, and children’s activities.  
Website: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/bps/

Butterfly Conservation Sussex Branch (BCSB)
Grant awarded: £1,914
Project: Preparing for the launch of a Sussex Butterfly Atlas. This includes developing a recording section of the BCSB website, publishing a butterfly recording booklet to encourage participation, providing training and holding a butterfly recorders’ conference.
Website: www.sussex-butterflies.org.uk.

Derbyshire Amphibian and Reptile Group
Grant awarded: £1,905
Project: Producing exhibition and training materials and buying a laptop, to promote the group, publicise its current projects and volunteer opportunities and to raise awareness of native amphibians and reptiles.
Website: www.derbyshirearg.co.uk.

Dorset Bat Group
Grant awarded: £1,945
Project: Providing bat survey equipment for the Bats in the Belfry project, which will work alongside Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Living Churchyards and Cemeteries project to engage local communities in the management of their churchyards for the benefit of wildlife.
Website: www.dorsetbatgroup.org.uk.

Friends of Baddesley Common
Grant awarded: £825
Project: Conducting a public consultation with the local community and other users of Baddesley Common to make sure the actions of this new group will meet their needs. The consultation will include focus groups, a household questionnaire survey and a public meeting.

Friends of Burgess Hill Green Circle Network
Grant awarded: £1,909
Project: The group has recently extended its remit from managing one site in the Burgess Hill area to managing 13. This grant will support the purchase of equipment for surveys and training across all 13 sites.
Website: www.bh-green-circle.org.uk.

Friends of Markeaton Park
Grant awarded: £1,901
Project: Teaming up with other local wildlife groups to run a mini Bioblitz, for children and adults to record a wide range of wildlife in the park.
Website: www.fomp.org.uk.

Gloucestershire Naturalists’ Society
Grant awarded: £1,640
Project: To support the Gloucestershire Bird Atlas project, by producing digital bird species distribution maps and by holding a county-wide event to report on progress of the atlas and show the results to date.
Website: www.glosnats.org.uk.

Hampshire Fungus Recording Group
Grant awarded: £1,760
Project: Buying and developing display materials, such as a compound microscope and projection screen, to promote awareness of the role of fungi in the natural world and the activities of the local group and national fungus groups.
Website: www.hampshirefungi.org.uk.

Hampshire Ornithological Society
Grant awarded: £1,901
Project: Developing display materials to promote the fun and conservation value of bird watching and recording. The grant will also support the Grey-Roosevelt Centennial Walk, celebrating 100 years since Lord Edward Grey (naturalist and Foreign Secretary) and Theodore Roosevelt (naturalist and US President, 1901-1909) walked a section of the Itchen valley and New Forest, and comparing their bird records of 1910 with those recorded by the public in 2010.
Website: www.hos.org.uk.

The Hardy Orchid Society
Grant awarded: £1,934
Project: Attracting new members by upgrading lecture audio equipment, producing new leaflets and increasing the print run of the society's quarterly journal. The society will also enhance its conservation activities by providing workshops on the germination of legal wild orchid seed.
Website: www.hardyorchidsociety.org.uk.

Horsham Natural History Society
Grant awarded: £620
Project: Producing new, high-quality membership leaflets and laminated posters to publicise the society in Horsham and the surrounding areas.
Website: www.hnhs.org.uk.

Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union
Grant awarded: £836
Project: Producing four high-visibility banners that will stand out and attract the public at busy events, and give the society a more professional image.
Website: www.lnu.org.

Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists’ Society
Grant awarded: £1,520
Project: Updating the society’s promotional materials, including new membership leaflets and children’s nature checklists. The society is also developing a countywide mass participation survey to map the distribution of the Common Frog and Common Toad, in partnership with the Norfolk Amphibian and Reptile Group.
Website: www.nnns.org.uk.

Orpington Apiary Club
Grant awarded: £2,000
Project: To install an observation hive close to the apiary, allowing a close-up view of the bees and how they operate inside a hive. At Saturday sessions, the public will have an opportunity to try bee-keeping themselves.

Quekett Microscopical Club
Grant awarded: £1,650
Project: To investigate the potential for widnening access to recorded lectures via DVD or web streaming. The grant will support the club in gaining professional advice and training, developing skills that it can share with other societies.
Website: www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/quekett.

Risley Moss Action Group
Grant awarded: £1,400
Project: Buying equipment and producing promotional leaflets to run a series of wildlife training and recording sessions.  These will promote awareness of the diverse range of wildlife found on Risley Moss reserve and encourage participants to take a more active role in surveying and recording.
Website: www.rimag.org.uk.

RSPB Gloucestershire
Grant awarded: £1,600
Project: Buying a laptop and digital projector so that inspiring wildlife talks (once on 35mm slides) can be brought to a wider audience. Publicity leaflets will promote these talks and the wider work of the group to the local community.
Website: www.rspbgloucestershire.co.uk.

Shropshire Bat Group
Grant awarded: £1,200
Project: Buying a harp trap (a portable 'live' trap for catching bats without causing them damage) to complement existing bat detector surveys. The harp trap will allow the group to gather data on numbers, sex, breeding condition, age and health, which is not provided by sound recordings.
Website: www.naturalshropshire.org.uk/SpeciesGroups/ShropshireBatGroup/tabid/66/Default.aspx.

Shropshire Botanical Society
Grant awarded: £2,000
Project: Expanding the social networking aspects of the Herbaria at Home web-based citizen science project, in which volunteers record enormously valuable information from historical herbarium sheets. The project will make it easier to add and edit biographies, find out where a particular collector was on a given date, and add handwriting samples.
Website: www.shropshire.bsbi.org.uk  and www.bsbi.org.uk/html/herbaria.html.

Sorby Natural History Society
Grant awarded: £1,214
Project: Enhancing the existing series of identification and training workshops with improved digital and teaching microscopes. Subjects include ichneumon wasps, mammal bones from pellets, snail-killing flies and botanical illustration.
Website: www.sorby.org.uk.

Sussex Amphibian and Reptile Group
Grant awarded: £499
Project: Improving the group's website by creating new content, improving functionality and making it easier to find information. A postcard will promote the new website and encourage people to send in their records.
Website: www.sussexarg.org.uk.