The State of the Environment Project is an opportunity for local people to get involved in the monitoring of key indicators within the AONB, to help with the management of the area for the future. The main focus of the work is getting people out into the landscape, to understand how important it is and why we need to manage it for the future.
By collecting this baseline information we will be able to monitor changes against our findings, and assess if and what, changes are occurring.
Surveys
Hedgerow Survey
This round of surveying is well underway, with 16 farms surveyed as part of the condition monitoring and a further 17Km sq. sections digitally mapped to assess hedgerow length.
In general the hedges were found to be in reasonably good condition with over half proving to be shockproof without the aid of a fence, although 2/3 of the hedges surveyed also had the added protection of a fence. In addition, over half the hedges surveyed were managed in a traditional way e.g. layed, and in terms of species present the majority of those surveyed contained between 3 and 5 species. It is intended to re-survey these farms in the future to observe any changes and to build up a record over time.
The digital mapping survey was largely carried out by one dedicated volunteer, John Milner, who compared hedges from 1947 and 2000 and calculated the changes in that 50yr period. From the 297,974 km of hedges mapped from 17 x 1km2 sites in 1947, it was calculated that there had been a decline to the 241,212Km figure for the 2000 map (loss of 56,762km or 19%). This work can be built on and could potentially cover the whole of the AONB in the future.
Photographic Survey
The Fixed Point Photography monitoring project is underway with 8 points installed (6 ground located and 2 building sites). Due to the technical nature of this survey, at present we are running trial shoots from each of the locations. Each point will be looking at different landscape objectives, thus the current methodology needs to be adaptable for each site. Once this is finalised it is envisaged that the actual photographic recording will be very straightforward and easy to undertake. The team is working on some additional sites in order to get the best coverage and address as wide a range of landscape issues as possible. Once this stage is complete we will be looking for possible volunteers to help take photos at the various points and a short training exercise will be arranged.
Bird Survey
This survey was designed to be a baseline bird census for the AONB, and by using methods from several combined surveys which are available from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) the AONB Bird Survey was devised. The main purpose of the survey was to encourage the wider community to get involved in bird conservation and enable less confident bird enthusiasts to get involved in surveying, possibly as a stepping stone towards undertaking the more in-depth national recording programs.
28 sites were covered by volunteers between April and July 2006 with each site having 2 recording visits, the survey provided good coverage across the AONB, with approximately 4,364 sightings recorded.
As this survey is in its initial stages and with only one year of records it is difficult to analyse the data, therefore we are investigating ways of interpreting the results so that they have more context within the AONB and can help plan any future surveys.
Butterfly Monitoring
In joint collaboration with Butterfly Conservation the North Devon AONB has been coordinating a habitat survey for the Marsh Fritillary; a rare and important butterfly.
A training event was run in June at Volehouse Moor near Woolsery, which provided us with a great location to show the volunteers the methods of habitat monitoring, needed to assess the condition of various Culm grassland sites for potential or current Marsh Fritillary populations.
Several sites have been identified by Butterfly Conservation, within the AONB boundary such as Bursdon Moor and Brownsham Farm, and so far a number of volunteers have been providing records. This survey can be carried out at any time of year and is an ongoing recording project, which is hoping to obtain as many records as possible.
County Wildlife Site's
The North Devon AONB has been involved in this County wide project for several years, the project is run by Devon Biodiversity Records Centre (DBRC) and is concerned with sites of County wildlife importance. This year a number of sites have been identified from a photographic mapping survey, to be of interest to the project. To undertake field survey of all these sites, though the DBRC, would be very expensive, with many sites not being of sufficient interest to become a County Wildlife Site.
It was decided therefore, to use volunteers to undertake a filtering process for some of the lower priority sites, to decide if they warrant a full survey or should be removed from the list. This work involves a quick 'over the hedge check' to see if the category assigned by the desktop work fits and is worthy of survey by a professional botanist.
We still have several sites in the Torridge District that need surveying between now and the spring, so if you are interested and want to know more please contact Janine.
* Find out more by contacting Joe Hutchinson or Martin Caddy on 01237 423655 or click HERE to check out the NDCCS website
