March is a busy time for most ecologists. The end of the financial year is always busy with projects coming to and end and final reports needed but for most ecologists, the spring is when we start looking forward and planning for the next field season. This often includes identifying suitable field sites for experiments, planning what fieldwork will be happening when and ensuring any necessary permissions are in place. When the weather is like it has been for the last few weeks I use scoping out field sites as an excuse to be out in the spring sunshine!

Yesterday Ezra and I visited Hutton Roof Craggs. Hutton Roof is a beautiful pavement, partly owned by Cumbria Wildlife Trust the site has some lovely areas of intact pavement as well woodland, scrub, grassland and heathland. While it is still too early in the year for botanical surveys, which I usually start in mid-May in upland habitat such as these, it is a special place for a visit.

The aim of this visit was to test if it was going to be possible to relocate areas where Stephen Ward originally took photographs of Hutton Roof during his 1970s survey. I am keen to use them to demonstrate how much sites have (or have not) changed. Some photographs were clearly not going to be possible to relocate so I picked out some with distinctive landscape features. Very helpfully they were all labelled with locations and sometimes grid references to help me get started. I was worried it would prove a challenging task after so many years but I was pleasantly surprised that we were able to relocate all of the photographs I selected. Some areas had changed surprisingly little and trees and eratics were very useful in relocating locations. In other areas the increase in scrub cover was quite apparent. The original photographs were taken in the summer so now I know this is a feasible approach I will go back in summer so the photographs better show how the sites have changed over the last 50 years.

We were also looking at potential locations for Ezra’s new management experiment, a really exciting opportunity to be able to test management approaches in limestone pavement and contribute to building an evidence base to support management decisions.

Related Blogs

• 

  Quarry Life

• 

  Farming Limestone Pavements

• 

  50 years of vegetation change in limestone pavements

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.