 97% of Britain's meadows have been lost in the last 100 years. I work at the Open University with a floodplain meadows partnership to help encourage their restoration. I coordinate the annual volunteer counting of plants. These are the findings for the very rare snakeshead fertility, for you can see last year's count fell dramatically to almost zero. We've been counting at North Meadow in Wiltshire one of Britain's best protected floodplains. But it was flooded for an unprecedented 10 months from May 2012 to April 2013 and the effect on the snakeshead fertility's population was staggering. In 2012 we recorded 1,800 individual plants. In 2013 we recorded only five. So I'm off to North Meadow to find out what the population looks like this year. We don't know whether dormancy is possible or whether the fertility's will have disappeared. Floodplains are part of our natural habitat and species rich floodplain meadows were once common across most of the UK's lowland river systems. Traditionally a rich source of hay and offering excellent grazing land, they are today home to an abundance of beautiful and rare plants. But how are these plants coping with some of the biggest floods Britain has seen for many decades? So what we're doing, counting these fritillaries, is really valuable in terms of understanding their ecology, understanding how they function in a changing climate. This count is very scientific because we measure exactly the same points using highly accurate GPS technology every year. 13 centimetres. And it's good news, early indications are that the snakeshead fritillaries have returned here. This shows just how resilient nature can be and builds our understanding of this special plant's physiology. Improved understanding means we can provide better advice on how to manage these sites in increasingly uncertain climatic conditions. Today's results are really good news for the whole ecosystem here. The main pollinator of the snakeshead fritillary is the queen bumblebee. We are starting to look at the relationship between fritillaries and bumblebees and are carrying out volunteer surveys here. So our research will continue to investigate how to protect these special places.