Surveying in the Slad valley
One of the critical aspects of the Glorious Grasslands project is to survey the various sites where meadows have been restored in the past. Today I made my way up to the stunning Slad valley where some seed was sown a couple of years ago.
The location was not far from Swift’s Hill reserve, so you’d also expect a lot of species to flow from there also. There were five of us and it took a good four hours to survey the area using the grid square mapping technique.
The site was stunning, particularly the top field. We found most of the indicator species in most of the squares, so the land management plan seems to be working well. Even in the swathy lower slopes there were signs of yellow rattle, so over time the meadow will establish further.
It was also an opportunity to test an app I’ve written for easily collecting the species list in the field, against every OS grid square that we needed to cover. It proved very successful, and popular among the surveyors because they don’t need to do any more work after leaving site.
I need to work with Anna to get this data integrated with the QGIS maps to avoid uploading by hand. Once I’ve got a few scripts written, it should be an easy task to automate for other surveyors on the project.
