14/08/2026
“What can I do to help?”
Someone asked this yesterday in relation to the fire still burning in the New Forest and it really made me stop and think. Around 160 hectares have been affected and it remains an active incident, with hotspots and flare-ups still being dealt with.
The immediate answer to the question is not obvious. The fireground itself is off limits and, once it is safe, it will be for the relevant ecologists and land managers to assess the ecological impact and what recovery or restoration may be needed. At the moment, we simply do not know what that impact has been and it would be wrong to try to quantify it before those surveys have taken place.
Research on heathland fire suggests that reptiles and less-mobile life stages of some invertebrates can be particularly vulnerable, while birds and larger mammals have more opportunity to move away. Forestry England has said that the commoners’ animals are able to roam freely to unaffected areas.
There is another important backdrop to this. The New Forest Biodiversity Forum has commissioned a major Biodiversity Audit from Footprint Ecology, due later this summer. It will provide an up-to-date picture of the species we know occur across the New Forest, their distribution and the different ecological communities and conditions they depend upon. In other words, even before this fire, our understanding of the extraordinary biodiversity of the Forest was still being brought up to date.
What happens next on the heath is likely to be complicated. Beneath the vegetation is a soil “seed bank”; viable seeds that have accumulated over time and can provide one route for plants to return after disturbance. It is not, however, a complete backup copy of everything that was growing there. Research on British heathland has found heathers strongly represented in the seed bank while many other plant species were absent. Fire severity matters too, because how much of the vegetation, litter and soil is affected will influence which shoots, roots and seeds survive. Green shoots may appear surprisingly quickly in some places, while restoring the full diversity and structure of a mature heathland ecosystem is a much longer process.
Woodland works on another timescale again. We know there are trees in the New Forest more than 500 years old. As trees age they accumulate hollows, deadwood, fissured bark and other features that become habitats in their own right. Research has found around 2,300 species associated with British oak, with 326 depending on oak for their survival and another 229 rarely found on other trees. Old beech is also particularly important for insects, fungi, lichens and other wildlife. That is why the eventual assessment of the woodland will need to be considered quite separately from recovery on the open heath.
Which brings me back to that original question: what can we do?
Most of us cannot do anything directly about what is happening on the fireground. What we can do is think about the spaces where we actually make the decisions.
A garden, field, patio, balcony or even a window box can provide food and small areas of habitat. We can grow flowers for insects, provide water or a pond, allow some grass to grow longer where it is safe, leave a few “weeds”, fallen leaves and dead stems and create sheltered places with logs and stones. Long vegetation, compost heaps and sunny log or stone piles with plenty of crevices can also provide useful cover for reptiles and amphibians.
None of that replaces habitat affected by a fire somewhere else and it is not about providing homes for wildlife displaced from the heath. It is simply a way of putting our energy into the places where we genuinely have some influence. If the fire makes people ask what they can do for nature, the answer may begin very close to home.
