Hazel Graves writes:

Our second meeting at the Friends Meeting House in Leicester saw a good-sized audience with some new members.  Several members reported sightings, including the first Fieldfares of the winter, an unusual spurge, the Willow Emerald Dragonfly and an Otter in Knighton.

Nicola then introduced Isabel Ravel for the main event of the evening, a talk entitled “The Charnwood Forest Partnership Scheme”.

Isabel then explained the background of various attempts since 1925 to establish protection for Charnwood Forest, “Britain’s Unexpected Upland”.  It didn’t make it onto the short-list to be considered a National Park, and the intrusion of the M1 certainly stopped the possibility of that happening. Moves were made to create a Regional Park in 2012, and this became a reality in 2017.

A lottery project was funded and Isabel discussed the work that LRWT have been involved in i.e. the area in which she works, the Grassland Project, based on Plantlife’s “Save our Magnificent Meadows” methodology.  Base-line surveys were made using quadrats and the number of positive and negative indicators recorded.  The idea was to manage these 39 areas, some belonging to the Trust, some under private ownership, using methods which were thought to improve the grasslands for traditional species. Traditional management methods were adopted, including changes to grazing and mowing times, scything as a means of haymaking in areas inaccessible to modern large machinery, and spreading of hay from “good” meadows onto prepared fields so that the seed would fall in these fields. The project was expected to last for 5 years but finished in 2024.  Quadrats were used to find differences made by the  treatments. Due to the shortened time-scale, most area had only 2 data points which makes statistical analysis difficult although it did look as if some of the treatments had improved the grasslands. It is hoped that it will be possible to follow up this work beyond the Lottery funded experiments. 

Another aspect of the Lottery money was to encourage recording and training recorders.  Weekly field recording meetings are being led by Isabel to which members are invited.

There was a discussion, which included questions on the statistical analysis, whether invertebrates were studied as part of the project and how to disseminate the findings.