First of all, what is the Ecosystem Invaders campaign? Ecosystem invaders is our campaign to raise awareness of invasive species, which are non-native species that negatively impact our environment, and their impacts. You’re probably thinking that doesn’t sound very difficult, but in reality, it can be very hard to engage people with a topic that they know little about and may think is not very important.

Find out more about the Ecosystem Invaders campaign!

We launched our campaign in May at the beautiful National Botanic Gardens of Wales. Despite the rain we had plenty of people chatting to us about invasive species and over 30 people attended our talk ‘Day of the Triffids’. Following the campaign launch we’ve been running around the country spreading the word about invasive species and how you can help stop their spread through pop-up events. We’ve also attended a number of larger events including ‘Our Future Festival’ in Bridgend and the National Eisteddfod in Tregaron.

We’ve also promoted the campaign on social media, where we’ve made fun (well we think so!) invasive species quizzes. Throughout the campaign we launched a new quiz each week for our weekly ‘Quiz Friday’. You can still find all of our quizzes here, why don’t check them out for yourself!  Our Ecosystem Invaders campaign officially finished at the Eisteddfod. This was a great event and over the 7 days we chatted with almost 1500 people. We had fun games and activities for all the family, including our amazing invasive species hunt and out environmental DNA (eDNA) activity where you could win your very own pack of invasive species ‘top-trumps’!

Activities were great and genuinely interesting whilst providing information about invasive species and how to mitigate them

We loved getting out and about to run the campaign, it was great to chat with different people and hear about their experiences with, and knowledge of (or lack thereof) invasive species! In total we talked to over 3000 people at 16 events, had 484 sign-ups to our pledge and our Ecosystem Invaders webpage was visited by over 8500 people from Facebook alone! Over the course of the campaign the awareness of invasive species in Wales increased by 6%. Although we know we weren’t the only ones raising awareness of invasive species in Wales, we still like to think that this increase was all down to us!

Awareness of invasive species increased by 6%

You are probably thinking that this all sounds great, well… while it was great we did have a few setbacks, although they were often out of our control! If you live in Wales you can probably guess the main challenge we met. Yes, that’s right it was the weather! There were a few events that probably should have been rained off, but we persisted (and almost lost the marquee a couple of times)! As the weather in Wales at times is often unpredictable (and that’s putting it mildly) we had a few pop-ups with low attendance, we won’t take this personally of course.

We’re hoping to run the campaign again next year and we’re already coming up with new and quirky ideas… just think invasive species meets temporary tattoos! Our stand at the Eisteddfod this year was already pretty awesome (although it did take us around 7 hours to set up the structure), but next year we are coming back bigger, better and with more invasive species! Keep an eye out for any invasive species and the launch of our 2023 Ecosystem Invaders campaign!! Can’t wait to see you all next year.

Find out more about the Ecosystem Invaders campaign!