ENV11101 Humans and Wildlife Edinburgh Napier University Assessment Brief - Development Proposal 2025

8. Purpose of assignment

This is an exercise in practical conservation and community engagement. It allows you to investigate small-scale initiatives, many of which may be broadly applicable to different contexts and relatively easily implemented. You have scope to follow up a topic area of personal interest and to develop expertise.

You will develop skill in creating a convincing argument.
It is also an exercise in identifying and fulfilling people’s needs: a skill tightly linked to employability in any sector.

Jobs in the conservation sector often require experience in grant writing or involve budgeting: this proposal gives you a little practice at that.
This is an opportunity to practice budgeting and pitching a proposal on a small scale and to integrate your interests in nature conservation, community development and enterprise.

9. Deadline of submission

5 pm (UK Time) on Friday 7 Nov 2025 (week 9)

Your attention is drawn to the penalties for late submissions: capped at P1 if up to one week late, not marked if more than one week late.

If you are affected by circumstances outside your control which mean that you may miss a deadline, use the RE1 form available at https://my.napier.ac.uk/your-studies/academic-issues/extenuating- circumstances to apply to the module leader for an extension. Note that you should apply for an extension when the circumstances arise, not only when the deadline looms. Failure to do so may influence the evaluation of the extension request or may result in the deadline passing before your request is reviewed. The normal email response time is three working days.

10. Arrangements for submission

Submit via the Turnitin link on the module Moodle as a single document. Rename the file before uploading: begin the filename with your matriculation number. Do not put your name in the document. Paper copies are not required. One draft submission is allowed: markers do not comment on drafts but you will see the originality report. You will not see the originality report on the final submission but your marker will.

Keep your own copy of the assessment and save draft versions in separate files with the version number or date in the filename so that you could go back to earlier versions if necessary. Back up your work.

By submitting your work you signify that you agree with the following statement:
“I agree to work within Edinburgh Napier University’s Academic Conduct Regulations which require that any work that I submit is entirely my own and has not been submitted for another assignment. The regulations require me to use appropriate citations and references in order to acknowledge where I have used any materials from any sources. I am providing my student matriculation number in place of a signed declaration in order to comply with Edinburgh Napier University’s assessment procedures.

11. Assessment Regulations:

All assessments are subject to the University Regulations

13. The requirements for the assessment

Propose enhancements to a small nature reserve located in or close to human habitation in any country. Your enhancements may include management strategies, habitat restoration, habitat enhancement interventions, features, installations, events or programmes of events to create maximum benefit for both humans and wildlife. You must identify a real site, supply location maps and describe the local context in terms of wildlife habitat and the local community (an appendix may be used for this). A suitable site would be relatively small (perhaps between 10 and 100 hectares) and in or near to a human settlement.

Imagine* you are bidding competitively for up to £500,000** to fund your proposal for a period of five years. If your proposal costs less than
£500,000, smaller awards can be made. Aim to convince the grant- awarding body, by the use of evidence, that the ratio of cost to benefit in your proposal is optimal. Considering the word limit, this tends to mean that proposals with a lower cost can be easier to justify.

Your proposal may have a principal aim to benefit people (for example; orienteering trails, programmes of events to engage local teenagers with the reserve, installation of play equipment or other facilities) but it must also provide benefits for wildlife.

Your proposal may have a principal aim to benefit wildlife (for example; meadow creation, pond management, installation of artificial nest/roost sites) but it must also engage with and benefit local people.

Structure your proposal as follows:

Lay summary (500-1000 words, not including tables/maps/diagrams/figures) in suitable, non-technical language aimed at site managers and local residents as well as the grant-awarding panel. This should include:

• Aims and objectives
• Description of your proposal
• Cost of the proposal
• Schedule of work to achieve objectives

Scientific justification (800-1500 words, not including tables/maps/diagrams/figures) aimed at the academics on the grant- awarding panel. Using the best available evidence, construct a convincing argument in favour of your proposal.

There is some flexibility in how you divide the document between lay summary and scientific justification but the word limit for the proposal as a whole is 2000 words.

References in APA style according to guidelines on Moodle

Appendices:

• Budget (to include 5 years’ running costs as well as establishment costs and an estimate of volunteer hours needed if volunteer labour is to be used)
• More detailed schedule of work than in lay summary, if necessary.
  No more than 8 pages of appendices should be included and perhaps none will be necessary.

14. Special instructions

At level 11, you are expected to demonstrate a good degree of critical appraisal of your own work, using all the resources available to you to determine whether your work is good and how it might be improved rather than merely following instructions.

Plan thoroughly enough that if awarded the grant you would know where to start. Think about wider impacts, not just on the site itself. Be realistic: for example, if you expect organisms to colonise the site, think about from where they could disperse.

Aim for a development idea that can be described in a few words, leaving yourself more space and time for making the argument in its favour: relatively simple developments will probably make a better proposal.

The budget is a list of everything that costs money and an idea of what each part will cost. It might help to think through your proposal in terms of some general cost categories such as:

• materials
• labour: consider how long tasks will take, use job adverts to identify likely salaries, consider the cost of training and on-costs such as employer's national insurance & pension contributions, sick/holiday cover etc which usually adds 30-50% to the salary. Salary on-cost calculators for the UK are widely available on the web. Remember that if you employ someone, they probably need office equipment and/or a work mobile.
• fees for services (such as web hosting, insurance, advertising, planning permission and various others)

A budget is not normally referenced in a grant bid, you would simply state how your costs are broken down. In this case we're asking for substantiation so that if a marker is surprised by any of the costs we can check them out and if they have a reasonable basis then we can accept them. Evidence for costs included in the budget will often consist of a weblink to a page advertising the item/service and stating the cost.

Occasionally, it may be appropriate to reference a personal communication if you have contacts in the industry who have advised you roughly how much something costs: the citation should state “personal communication: person’s name, person’s job role”.
Strictly speaking, a reference to a website should follow the school's standard referencing guidelines but for the budget, you may simply.

include have a column in your budget table containing web links (and/or other sources).

The project does not have to take five years to achieve; although benefits have to last at least five years. If you can install something quickly that lasts a long time, that's a bonus. Do make sure you cost in any maintenance or monitoring it might need for the first five years and if there are ongoing costs beyond five years some kind of plan to sustain the project in the long term (income generation or a plan for future grant application) is advantageous.

If you make several interventions, they do not all have to be related to one another although you should present an overall scheme that is coherent. Make sure that issues, aims and interventions are clearly linked.

If you are hitting the word limit, consider describing your intervention(s) using diagrams and/or maps to replace some of the text. Tables do not count towards the word limit and are useful for imposing structure on ideas - lining up this column of something against that column of something else - so they also help to alert you if your proposal doesn't align well or if the contents of one cell are missing.

Although in the real world it is good practice, you should not consult the public in the preparation of this assignment. We have not the capacity to supervise multiple questionnaires, surveys or interviews; surveying creates an expectation that the work will really be carried out (in most cases it will not) and if many of you base your work on Craiglockhart the locals could be swamped with survey requests; hence, no opinion surveys please. If it is important to your proposal to respond to public opinion and you don’t have existing sources to outline these opinions, you could include a public consultation phase as part of your proposal. Alternatively, past students have included mocked-up survey results (clearly marked as fictitious) in appendices to enable them to show how they would respond to the results of public consultation.

Monitoring success against your objectives is important for several reasons: feeding back to volunteers to keep them engaged; adapting the intervention to make it more effective; showing funders that you achieved what you set out to do (helping to get future funding); generating evidence to fill a gap in the evidence base if this was not already a well-proven intervention.

You want to supply enough information about the site for the reader to recognise that the proposal is ideal for the site so, for example, if your proposal is about connectivity of woodland habitats, show where surrounding woodland habitats are; if it's about educational resources for schools, show where the nearby schools are, etc. Maps are good - maybe more than one at different scales to show the very local context in more detail and the wider surroundings in less detail. A paragraph of description about the surrounding neighbourhood and habitats might be enough general background, then focus on supplying the habitat/conservation/demographic information that supports your arguments. Much of it can go in appendices.

15. Return of work

Feedback will be returned electronically within three weeks of the date of submission. If you do not understand your feedback or you are not sure how you can apply this feedback to future work, please email the module leader.

16. Assessment criteria

See the separate file “Development Proposal Grading Criteria” on Moodle.