The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme aims to provide robust population estimates for the beloved hedgehog.
Despite being the nation’s favourite mammal, there's a lot more to learn about hedgehog populations across the country. We do know that, although urban populations are faring better than their rural counterparts, overall hedgehogs are declining across Britain, so much so that they’re now categorised as Vulnerable to extinction. -- NHMP
The People's Trust for Endangered Species has been coordinating the programme. For the purposes of this project, we have access to:
- GPS data from over 100 tagged hedgehogs collected by Lauren Moore during her PhD to build predictive movement models.
- OpenStreetMap data about where hedgehogs probably shouldn't be (e.g. middle of a road) to help with species distribution modelling
- PTES also run the Hedgehog Street program which has the mapped locations of hedgehog highways across the UK to assess how effective they are.
- A high-resolution map of England's hedgerows, woodland and stone walls at 25cm resolution, which Drew Purves pointed me at. The map is the work of Michelangelo Conserva et al at Google, who describe the segmentation model behind it in Mapping Farmed Landscapes from Remote Sensing.
The initial effort in the summer of 2025 was to put together a high resolution map of UK hedgehog habitats, specifically brambles and likely urban habitats. From there the plan is to apply spatially explicit modelling, still focussing on the UK, in collaboration with the PTES.
1 Project notes
Gabriel Mahler ran the first iteration as a summer internship in 2025, alongside writing up his MPhil dissertation on Enhancing Navigation Algorithms with Semantic Embeddings. He very successfully completed the internship and handed over the habitat mapping work at the end of the summer.
The 2026 iteration is to build an area of habitat map for the hedgehog, and is being investigated by Isabel Mansley as a 2026 summer internship. An area of habitat (AoH) map takes a species' range polygon and refines it down to the parts that could plausible contain habitat the species can live in.
We are building a purpose-built hedgehog habitat map first as an experiment, to see if specialising brambles, gardens, hedgerows and the urban edge will help vs being generalised into a global scheme. That map will then feed the AoH calculation
2 Public interest
This project has drawn public attention for its charismatic target species. It began with a conversation with Silviu Petrovan shortly before a National Geographic workshop in 2025, and the combination of hedgehogs and TESSERA then ran through a week of BBC and ITV coverage in May 2026 and on into national breakfast news.