Lisa Lane has also overseen the creation of an entirely new channel of the River Thames at BBOWT's Chimney Meadows reserve in West Oxfordshire.

In the past year she has continued working for BBOWT despite being diagnosed with breast cancer on Christmas Eve 2020 and undergoing extensive treatment.

BBOWT’s Chief Executive Estelle Bailey nominated Lisa for the Marsh Charitable Trust Leadership Award which recognises 'an individual who has led an innovative or transformative project to bring back wildlife', and she was announced as a winner this month.

Lisa, who is BBOWT's Living Landscape Manager for the Upper Thames, said:

"It is amazing to get this award: I really appreciate the recognition because it's been hard work, but I was still surprised, honoured and delighted to get it.

"It has been a difficult year for many reasons, but I continued working as much as I could. I was determined to see our project through, having worked on its development for so long. I’ve always just wanted to help make the world a better place - especially for wildlife.”

Lisa started working with BBOWT in 2004 as a reserve officer for Chimney Meadows - a huge tract of former commercial farmland which it had bought just four months previously after a huge public appeal, and now wanted to transform into a nature reserve.

Much of the work was uncharted territory, and Lisa had to do everything from scratch - walking the entire site to map it and buying an old barn to use as a base of operations. Crucially, she also masterminded a program of spreading green hay over the fields to seed the arable reversion process, based on a technique she had read about in British Wildlife magazine. It was to be one of the largest projects of its kind in the country.

She quickly started the Friends of Chimney Meadows group and recruited local wildlife lovers to help with the project. The group now has more than 20 volunteers.

Thanks to the hard work of all involved, Chimney Meadows has grown into a valuable and important nature reserve: its rare wetland habitat provides a home to nationally-declining wading birds such as curlew, which also breed at the site; the wildflower meadows are some of BBOWT’s most charismatic, with a host of beautiful flowers like the violet-coloured tufted vetch, and otters, water voles and brown hares are also found at the site.

In 2010 she started her current job as BBOWT's Living Landscape Manager for the Upper Thames. This meant overseeing the continuing development of Chimney Meadows, but also how it fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of surrounding natural habitats.

It was this challenge that gave Lisa the idea to try to improve opportunities for fish to move up and down stream in and around Chimney Meadows to improve the resilience of fish populations by providing access to new spawning and refuge habitats. This work would make fish populations more sustainable, contributing to a healthy river ecosystem and making them more resilient to environmental change.

Having spent years trying to realise this ambition, in 2018 a Water Environment Grant from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) became available for projects to improve the water environment in rural England.

Lisa spearheaded the process of applying for around £2 million to restore and create new river and floodplain habitats. The grant application process took years of perseverance, but despite the challenges, Lisa and her colleagues were successful, and on December 5, 2019, the project finally began. A year later, she received her diagnosis.

Lisa added:

“I really had to dig deep emotionally at times to make this project happen: it nearly failed at a few points, trying to bring everything together in the time we had. It would have been quite easy to give up, but I kept thinking ‘there has to be a way’.

"I have worked with many people over the years – volunteers, colleagues, funders, contractors and partners, and the development of Chimney Meadows Nature Reserve could not have happened without them. Lizzie Rhymes at the Environment Agency has been a great support in particular, since we first discussed helping fish over or around the various barriers in the river.”

The groundwork to create the new channel, bypassing Shifford Weir, started in June this year and had to be finished by the end of 2021. Thankfully, Lisa said that by the time of her diagnosis, she had been able to explain the vision to the project team, which meant that over the past year she was able to take time off when needed.

Now, she says:

"I'm teetering on the edge of excitement knowing we've almost done it - I just need to see those last trees in the ground. I’m looking forward to showing people what we have achieved – it’s so fantastic!”

Estelle Bailey, BBOWT Chief Executive, said:

"Lisa’s legacy is almost beyond words, especially as she has continued to work so hard for local wildlife through her illness. Over the past 17 years she has led the transformation of Chimney Meadows from a commercial farm to an incredibly diverse, 308-hectare, wildlife-rich nature reserve, and led the establishment of the Upper Thames Living Landscapes scheme.

"Lisa has brought in numerous funding projects with the help of our grants team, including constructing a new bird hide with interpretation along the Thames path, improving the diversity on over 80ha of grassland, and improving access and information on the ground to help the public understand the wildlife at Chimney Meadows, but also the wider landscapes. Her legacy is remarkable and one that will last in perpetuity."