Monitoring
Why monitor? What’s true in industry is true in ecology ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ (Peter Drucker). Traditionally for grassland the measurement would have been its economic value; the amount of hay it produced or the number of livestock it supported. For us neither of those metrics are relevant; biodiversity is though. However, this is far more difficult to measure as all natural systems, such as grassland, are changing not only due to species succession but also climate and natural changes in population numbers due to reasons beyond our control. It is also a far more complicated, time consuming and skilled process to carry out a bio-blitz and therefore far more expensive to measure. That said even non-experts, and I include myself in this category, can notice the difference between a species-rich habitat and one that’s not. Photographs taken over time are also an easy way to compare changes over time.
We haven’t yet carried out a bio-blitz to establish a ‘baseline’ in the field, due to its expense, however many people have commented on increases in forbs such as Cowslips, Early Purple Orchids, Pyramid Orchids and Tway Blade Orchids.
Great Crested Newt Survey
Last November I saw a Great Crested Newt on the hill behind Kingston Hill Fields. Would it breed in our pond in the Spring? To find out we sampled the water mid-May, breeding season, and had it analysed for GCN DNA. None turned up so either our sample didn’t pick it up or it had bred somewhere else, assuming it survived the winter.
Big Butterfly Count 3rd August 2022. The area covered in the count, the southeast side of fields, was 2.2% of the total area of the field. Calculating the estimated butterfly numbers for the whole field we get !564 Meadow Brown Butterflies and 2254 Common Blue Butterflies. Leaving aside the single species as these may not be representative of numbers in the field.
Castle Hill Nature Reserve (3rd April 2022)
Unless a grassland has low nutrients, or to be more accurate at a ‘natural’ level of nutrients many wildflowers won’t be able to compete and so won’t appear.
The colour difference illustrates the effect of fertiliser enrichment in the valley as compared with the unenriched downland on the slope beyond.
Kingston Hill Fields (3rd April 2022)
Similarly, we can see the difference in colour between our grassland, which has been unenriched since 2005, and the enriched grassland beyond. The colour of our field is begining to resemble the unenriched grassland of Castle Hill Nature Reserve.