The South Wales Valleys feature a fantastic rural urban interface, a real asset to communities. However, there can be clashes with this interface, such as wildfires, which can have serious consequences for the environment and the safety and wellbeing of the communities living there. Healthy Hillside is a case study about how we are applying the principles of the sustainable management of natural resources to a key issue affecting these communities. This is Frees Habitat and it's a mosaic of habitats. You have bracken, you have marshy grass and flushes, you have scrub habitat, you also have heathland habitats and it sits between the lowlands and the uplands and it's that marginal band of habitat which runs the length of the valleys. So we are looking at the bracken here and this is an area land which isn't managed presently. So when you look, there is a very, very deep layer of dead material and there is absolutely nothing growing underneath. At this time of year you would expect to see some shoots coming up of the species which grassland which underlies it. So all this layers on top of it is smothering that out completely. All this dead material is fantastic, kindling for fires. The fire service call it the big fuel load. This is what goes up in flames and they can continue right away across the Frees Habitat. So as part of the Frees Mosaic you have flushes which are small little water courses which rise in these hillfights and then flow down the valley. Whilst very small individual ones they all collect down into the river. So when these water courses travels through this burnt landscape it picks up all the dead carbon, the dead materials, the soils it causes erosion. It takes pollutants down into the water course and having this happen throughout the valley and throughout this hillside can have a much bigger effect down in the rivers when it's all been dragged into the water courses and it will impact on our water quality. It can have an impact on our drinking water, it costs more money to clean that water up. It costs more money to improve the habitats for fisheries or for the invertebrates or the general wildlife of rivers. So that knock on effect from the hillside is noticed in the water courses as well. So this hillside is actually quite important for us because in some ways this is where the project began. Back in early 2015 we'd met in the morning with the fire service, some of their wildfire officers and we'd chat about the recent burns and they told us that this hillside had all gone up overnight and it was a huge fire. So we visited the area and we took a couple of pictures and as we came to the site actually two members of the fire service were there being filmed by BBC Wales and we sort of hung around and then we started chatting and really that was the kind of starting point as well of where we really started to talk about wildfires how we could work together and I still remember what the chief of the fire service was what he said to me when I said we really interested in this particularly around the environment and he said he was music to his ears. So as we began working together and we came together we talked about the issues, the challenges we were facing. Early on it was sort of ourselves the fire service, one the kind of staff, the local authorities and the countryside team but over time gradually we had conservation partners, members of community community groups, the wildlife trust, south of the West Wales and we've sort of slowly sort of came together to really sort of talk about this kind of issue and as we've done that so much has grown around that because what's gone from a sort of single idea has grown into this sort of approach really which is on the one hand habitat management but on the other hand reducing the risk of fires as well. So what I've learned and taken from this approach is that no one organisation could so deliver this on its own, it's got collaboration at its heart, we each bring something different to the table. Fire bricks, natural fire bricks are closing up for passing, closing up to the brambles and the grasses and the bracken taking over and these fires are now getting larger because of this and this is one of the reasons why the fires who have moved into a sort of land management role because we've got this this manner that we've tried to stop the arsonists and we can't stop them all, we can't control away there but what we can do is manage the fuel and one of the ways of fighting fire is to remove the fuel and that's what we're now doing and the deal with these fires, traditionally we've thrown resources, thrown fire fighters at these fires, traditionally it was with beaked as walking up the mung dins in structural fire kit and beaked in these fires out and we've had an incidence where there's been 20 fire engines putting out a grass fire on the brick and beaked guns and now we've moved on and we know starting use fire to fight fire, we was fired before the fire season where we're managing vegetation fuel, we're managing it, we're creating narrow fire bricks, we don't burn landscapes, we create narrow fire bricks in strategic locations that stop these large fires. It's huge, it's been a bit of an eye-opener from all point of view how many other organisations are actually interested in what we do and we can all work together. To protect or make fire to safety better, certainly to enhance the natural environment for everybody and lastly and perhaps more importantly is to enhance the health and wellbeing of the people in the areas that we work. There's a number of sustainable management options for the hillsides, conservation grazing, if you're looking at all of the benefits of that hillside so all of the functions it provides, that's the one that comes out of giving them most multiple benefits. It manages, it retains the mosaic landscape and the complexity of the landscape which is good for both ecology and flood risk and aminity as well. So Bracken Bruising is one of the pilot management techniques that we were trialling and we're really lucky to have heavy horses come in and the benefit of those is that they can tackle on the steep slopes, slopes that aren't accessible to the machinery that we had available. And also one of the side benefits was it also brought the community in so it was a very good way of engaging locally in the work that we were doing. And the impact of that Bracken Bruising is that it reduces the vigor so the fire is creating a condition where the bracken's coming back stronger and more dominant every year and you lose all of those plant species underneath and all of the diversity around that. So by reducing the vigor you get a really broad diversity in and amongst that so we're not eradicating the bracken we're just reducing it so it doesn't become that dominant spread across the hillside and Bracken Bruising has that sensitivity for real ecological gain as well as benefits when it comes to reducing the fire risk. So here we're looking at much thinner layer of bracken, this is far more natural part of the mosaic of free habitat so you can see already this is the same time of year and we've got some bluebells coming through here so that bracken in a thin layer replicates the deciduous woodland habitat so it's very shaded so you get these species like violets and bluebells coming through in these habitats so this is a lot healthier you have that variety of species and in that comes the variety of invertebrates and reptiles and birds. You can you tell me what you've learned about the 9 principles of S&R in the initiative project? Really I think working in that way in involving more people having a much bigger conversation has just delivered so much more on the ground and so much more in the network. It's definitely opened our eyes to the different impacts of wildfires and as they insecure massive funding for research which you know it's going to be really beneficial long too and how we manage this issue not just here but right away across South Wales across Wales but it also has you know I feel that it's raised issues that will have an impact on in a local person as well so we've talked a lot about fly tipping associated with these sites we've talked about access so I think it really will make a difference to individuals but also a much wider scale so I think yeah it's brilliant way of working. In order to make this a long term sustainable project we need to work with communities to for them to take ownership of this issue in other countries it is quite common practice to manage that area between the hillside and your property to reduce the risk to prevent the fire from taking hold of your home. This would also act as a buffer strip for preventative measures for fire service they would know where to go but it would also be a nice buffer for habitat better for various invertebrates for birds to create that nice little strip so in order to do this we're working with the fire service to teach the communities what they can do to manage that so in the first couple of years we will be undertaking that practical management but working with the communities so they can eventually take that over so that we can then move on to another site and teach another community about how to protect themselves from fire. So what we've learnt about the sustainable management and natural resources is that it's not theoretical it's not hypothetical and it's not about box-ticking it's about really challenging yourself and flipping it and thinking about what you're working on and applying those nine principles to what you're doing.