My paper, the result of many years of research, came out last week. Most papers we write as academics don’t cause much of a stir when they come out but this one resulted in some media coverage and I filmed an interview for BBC North-West tonight.

The paper reports the results of a national survey of limestone pavements repeating the Ward and Evans survey which was conducted in the 1970s. The original survey, conducted by Stephen Ward and David Evans, was incredibly important and influential, it remains an important source of information on the ecology of British limestone pavements. I first encountered the survey when Cumbria Wildlife Trust asked me to supervise a student project repeating the survey for a single site. I was really excited because it presented so many opportunities but at the time I was heavily pregnant. I determined that as soon as I returned from maternity leave this was what I was going to be working on, and that was what I did. Stephen provided me with some training and the original grike measurer (I didn’t ever come up with a ‘proper’ name for it) and off I went, very optimistic and massively underestimating the task I had taken on! There were over 500 pavements to survey so by the end of the first summer of surveying, when I had done less than 100, the scale of the challenge was more apparent. However, I was hooked, limestone pavements are fascinating and beautiful so I scraped together the funding from an assortment of small grants each winter so that I could survey the following summer. It took me five field seasons to survey all of the pavements and then another couple of years to analyse all of the data and go through the publishing process (my daughter who I was pregnant with at the start is 8 now!). There were some of pavements that hadn’t changed an awful lot in the last 50 years but there were others that would have been unrecognisable to Stephen and David. Especially the pavements where the tree canopy had become very dense in the last 50 years and diversity had declined a lot. I was surprised by how thistles had become so much more abundant in some pavements and how other pavements had become almost lost underneath a canopy of bracken.

The point of repeating the survey was to see how the vegetation had changed and to provide an up-to-date picture of habitat conditions across the country. The survey certainly did do that but it did a lot more too. It probably goes without saying it got me fit again but it also highlighted to me the many knowledge gaps that exist in the management of limestone pavements and helped me to meet people associated with the management and conservation of limestone pavements across Great Britain. It was a real privilege to conduct the survey, I visited some incredible places and am now constantly looking for excuses to visit them again.

Photograph courtesy of Ian Boydon (Lancaster University).

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