Baseline survey
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Collecting baseline survey data, before treatments are applied, is an important part of any experiment and that is what I have just completed for the vegetation of the grazing plots. It has been very dry for more than a month now and unfortunately that has meant it has been too dry to get the sheep into the field I am working in yet. The plus side is that has given me a bit more time to collect my baseline survey data.
I collected two different types of data. In the grassland plots using a fixed 2 x 2 m quadrat is the best approach. I placed this in the centre of the plot and identified all of the higher and lower plants that were present. For each species I estimated the percentage cover. At the moment the plots are very dominated by the grass Seslaria albicans but hopefully at least one of the grazing treatments will change that. Nevertheless, there are still a surprising number of species in grasslands such as this and I recorded up to 12 species per plot.
I also measured quadrats in the limestone pavement plots but while this will give me the option of direct comparison between the grassland and the limestone pavements this isn’t the best approach for limestone pavements. The large amount of rock means that quadrats can be very variable and the cover of plants can very limited. This meant that in the pavements I needed to adopt another approach too so I also counted the frequency (literally the number of individuals) of species found within the grikes across the whole plot. This should give me a measure that is sensitive to change. The pavements have a good variety of plants in them with some enclosures having more than 20 species and many characteristic species present.
This data will give me something to compare to over time and will mean that I can detect change when it happens in response to the grazing treatments. Nature is inherently variable meaning that there are differences between the plots so having this ‘start point’ data is very important.
The impacts of the dry weather we have been having were very apparent when I collected the data. The soils is currently very dry which means I have been unable to bury my metal plot markers – this is something I will return to do once we have had a bit of rain.
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