AnnualReportfor20251SeptCOMP2026 - Flipbook - Page 4
An overview
Photo: Lesser horseshoe bats ©Tom Kitching
by the Chair of Trustees and CEO
Welcome to Vincent Wildlife
Trust’s Annual Report and Financial
Statements for 2025. The report
showcases our key achievements
during our 50th anniversary year and
at the half-way point of our Ten-Year
Strategy delivery. It also explains
our governance arrangements and
outlines our future plans. We are
delighted to report that 2025 was a
very positive year for VWT.
Conserving threatened mammals is
a huge task, as nature and the wider
environment continues, overall, to
decline and degrade, with one in
four British mammals classi昀椀ed as
threatened and therefore at risk
of extinction.
Against this background, Vincent
Wildlife Trust has been at the
forefront of efforts during the last
half a century to recover some of our
most threatened and iconic mammal
species — otters, horseshoe bats and
pine martens. The Trust is respected
nationally and internationally as
a leader in the demonstration
of innovative methods based on
pioneering research that aims to halt
and reverse declines in threatened
mammal species.
Thanks to the foresight of our founder,
the Honourable John Vincent Weir
(1935-2014), and the generosity
of our supporters, our impact has
consistently exceeded our size — and
while nature faces unprecedented
threats, the species we are working
with are bucking the downward trend.
Our 50th anniversary provided
an opportunity to celebrate our
achievements over the last half
century but also, more importantly,
to look ahead to the next 50-years
and develop a long-term vision for
VWT. This was published as our
report, Making an impact for wild
mammals — past present and future,
which we launched at a celebratory
event held at the Royal Society in
4 Vincent Wildlife Trust Annual Report and Financial Statements 2025
London in November, with keynote
speaker Simon King.
The last year was a busy year for
conservation delivery with the start of
a major new project, Landscape for
Lessers, following an award of nearly
£1m from the Welsh Government’s
Nature Networks Fund, and delivered
through the National Lottery
Heritage Fund. The project aims to
support recovery of lesser horseshoe
bat populations across Wales by
enhancing and linking existing
protected roost sites and building new
bat towers and night roosts to provide
stepping stones in the landscape.
We concluded two major citizen
science surveys on polecats and
Irish stoats that have since helped
us to address evidence gaps in the
distribution of these two elusive
mustelids. By involving the public in
these surveys, we can increase the
number of positive sightings, giving us
a bigger picture of their distribution.
