Surveying species rich grassland
The surveying season with Glorious Grasslands kicked off today with a training session in the Windrush valley. There were a lot of new faces in the team, so it was a good chance to go through how the survey app works, and also get a refresher from Anna on how to spot the main herbs and grasses we’re likely to come across.
The location was a stunning spot where we had done some habitat management late last year, and I always like to see what effect the work has had during the growing season.
The first part of the morning was a walk through by me of how to use the app to carry out the different types of survey. Everyone managed to follow along and get a test quadrat working.
After a tea and biscuits break laid on by the owner, we then set up quadrats to work for real.
The site today is not typical of a recipient site survey, since this was highly species rich, whereas the recipient sites by definition haven’t been restored yet. But that made it a great training site – the first 1m x 1m quadrat had 11 indicator species in it, and perhaps 25 altogether!
There were some rare grasses like sheep’s fescue and also grasses which Anna had never seen before. And there were the old favourites that even I managed to spot like bird’s foot trefoil and germander speedwell.
I took the opportunity to walk around the areas where the habitat management team worked in two sessions last December.
It was very pleasing to see some glades which had been created at the woodland edge had completely grassed over, creating many square meters of new grassland.
On the main slope, we removed dozens of shading hawthorn. These had also been grazed in the meantime and the grass was recovering nicely where it would have been shaded before.
One very nice feature spotted by Anna was a clump of dead Lords and Ladies and cleavers near a stump.
These are woodland plants that would have thrived under the shade of the tree before the management, and now they are unable to survive as the grassland takes over. This again is a really pleasing result from the (very) hard work of clearing scrub on the steep slope.
I met a lot of new people today and heard about some really amazing projects being worked on: community outreach, river ecology survey, water quality in the Evenlode and nutrient testing of hay. Some of these overlap with other projects I work on locally, so a really good chance to swap contact details and hopefully build connections between all different activity networks.
