Surveying the wild meadow

After an early morning haircut, I went down to Wild Acres to meet with Mel and Diane to carry out a quadrat survey of the meadow. We have done a large amount of restoration already, so this is a good chance to get a formal baseline so we can measure progress in future years.

The first job was to make a 1x1m quadrat from string and some cut hazel. We had a quick briefing about the methodology which will broadly follow the one that Glorious Grasslands use for lowland meadows. We determined 10 random locations in advance and set about identifying all the species inside the square.

Starting in the far corner, we were initially surveying areas that had, until recently been heavily scrubbed over. So they weren’t particularly diverse, with dock, horsetail and bramble particularly frequent.

But as we came further into the centre of the meadow, we started to pick up indicator species like Greater bird’s-foot trefoil and Agrinomy.

The site is covered in creeping cinquefoil, so this appeared in most quadrats, along with Timothy and Cock’s-foot grass.

A couple of species we debated for a while, in particular the hoary ragwort and bristly oxtongue.

We’re still validating the results, but overall there were 48 species recorded and around 7-10 per quadrat.

The lower threshold for a species rich grassland is 15 species in a quadrat, so in broad terms you could say we are maybe 50% of the way there. Will be interesting to see how the current management improves the diversity in a couple of years.

In very species rich grassland, I’ve seen consistently 21+ species per quadrat, so some way to go before Wild Acres is claiming SSSI status.

In the afternoon, I headed to the library to run the after school Dursley Code Club. A full house again today, all eight PCs occupied. This is normally the web and python club, but for some reason everyone decided to do scratch. This was perfectly fine, as that is a good way to build up the principles of coding with a graphical environment.