The National Trust have announced ambitious plans to reverse the decline in wildlife on all land in its ownership, including an aim to create 25,000 hectares of new habitats by 2025.

As one of the country's largest landowners, the Trust wants to play its part in addressing the dramatic slump in British species and improve soil quality and water quality in the countryside.

The conservation charity, which was set up to protect places of natural beauty, hopes to create and restore 'priority habitats', areas identified by the government as threatened and in need of conservation support.

Farming will remain vital to the Trust's approach to countryside management and the charity will work in partnership with tenant farmers to see how they can help deliver nature-rich, productive, fertile landscapes which are good for wildlife and good for farming.

Many of the Trust's 1,500 farm tenants are already farming in a way which benefits wildlife.

The charity said that it wanted to discuss, listen and learn from them and other groups as it explores how nature-friendly measures could be introduced or enhanced across all of its farmed land.

The aim is that at least 50 per cent of farmland will be 'nature-friendly' by 2025, with protected hedgerows, field margins, ponds, woodland and other habitats allowing plants and animals to thrive.

Peter Nixon, director of conservation of the National Trust, said: "Our charity was founded to protect our natural heritage and we believe we should be playing an active role in reviving it by doing what we can on our own land.

“Nature has been squeezed out to the margins for far too long. We want to help bring it back to the heart of our countryside.

"Despite the battering it’s taken over many decades, nature has an incredible ability to rejuvenate and revive if given the conditions to thrive.

“Birds such as the cuckoo, lapwing and curlew are part of the fabric of our rural heritage. But they’ve virtually disappeared from the countryside.

"We want to see them return to the fields, woods and meadows again, along with other wildlife which was once common and is now rare.”

Alex Raeder, natural environment lead for the National Trust in the South West said: "25,000 hectares equates to about 10 per cent of the Trusts national landholding.

"In the South West we have an ambition to create at least 5000 hectares of new habitat by 2025 which we believe will have a major impact on the environment and wildlife of the South West.

"We envisage that a great deal of this new habitat will be created, in consultation with our farm tenants and other stakeholders, on the coastline of the region.

"This represents the continuation of work that we have undertaken for many years to restore habitats for people and wildlife on the Coast but we now need to do this with a renewed urgency given the state of the nation’s wildlife.

"In addition to our work on the coast there are some fantastic opportunities and projects already underway inland, for example the restoration of species rich chalk grasslands around Stonehenge and our partnership with the Woodland Trust in the Teign Valley of Dartmoor National Park to restore native broadleaved trees in extensive areas of conifer woodland on sites that were once ancient Oak woodland."