SUNDERLAND's new football academy was praised yesterday at a conference aimed at persuading landscape designers to protect flora and fauna.

Architects and landscape designers from all over the North-East attended Living Landscapes - Biodiversity by Design at the Stadium of Light, home of Sunderland AFC.

The venue was chosen because the club's academy on 60 acres of former farmland at Whitburn incorporates measures to attract wildlife, including wetlands, reedbeds, hedgerows and 150,000 trees and shrubs.

The conference aimed to show how developers and landscape designers can work together to encourage wildlife as part of housing, retail, leisure and business developments.

Organisers included the Durham Biodoversity Partnership, for which Keith Bowey said: "At the academy site, we have a developer factoring in wildlife at the heart of what it is doing, rather than in a box to the side."

Club vice-chairman John Fickling said: "We are demonstrating that our core business can run alongside biodiversity. We feel we are in the process of creating a unique wildlife conservation area."

Supported by Northumbrian Water, One NorthEast and Government Office for the North East, it was the first conference in the UK to examine the impact of landscape design in rural and urban areas on wildlife.