 Dwi werthio. Well, I've been fair to them so I will get going. So, welcome to everybody to my talk Whereas All the Wildlife summer flooding and the importance of landscape conservation. It's so great to see so many of you joining us here today for the Open Day. It's obviously a special celebration for us here. I've obviously got quite a lot encompassed within this title, and I am going to try 然後 pile through as much information as I can in the next three quarters of an hour. 我会尔 ychydig i ddechrau'r cwmian ar y cwestiynau. Be cyfwis i ddatgani'r gweithio oherwydd unrhyw gyda'r gorau i fynd i gydag jocelyn llawer o'i roi wneud i'r ddweud trei o'r cloc, 所以 mae'n dechrau'n rhaid i'n gwneud. Felly, i ddigoniau'r ymdeg yng nghylch, llawer o rhan o fach yn ymweld y llefnol yn ymdeg ymddegau gyfyrddau yn ymddeg. Yn y gallwch yn ddeudio cymaint y cyfrifio, y cwmaint i ddod, mae ydych yn cyfnod. Cymun iddyn nhw'n ddweud y cyfrifio cyfrifio yn y ddod yn ddefnyddio'r ddweud. Y cyfrifio ymddir ymddir yw'r cyfrifio ac mae'r cyfrifio a'r cyfrifio a'r cyfrifio, a'r cyfrifio yn y ddweud. Ac mae'n ddefnyddio'r cyfrifio. Yn y ffrifio ymdill yma, yn ddwy'r ddwych arweithio'r tyfnol gyda gyddi'r gwaith hwnnw yn cael ei ffennu a'r ddechrau. A gyda'r ffordd o'r ddysgu hwnnw o ddysgu hwnnw o'r ddysgu hwnnw, mae'n ddiddordeb yn fwy o ffordd o gyddiad neu ddysgu hwnnw o'r oedd yn ddechrau. A ddysgu hwnnw o'r ffordd o'r oedd yn ddysgu hwnnw o ddysgu hwnnw o ddysgu hwnnw o ddysgu hwnnw. ac, ymwneud, unigweld ymwneud yn defnyddio i'r ffordd. Yn ymwneud, yma'n gwybod i'r 40% o'r ffordd yma'r ddweud yn ein gennyddiadau yma. Yn gwybod i'n ddylai'r ffrindwyr, ym mwyaf ein gennyddion eich gennyddion eich gennyddion. Yn ymwneud, yma'n gwybod i'r ffordd yma ydw i'n ymwneud yma ymwneud yma, ymwneud yn ymwneud i'r ddweud hynny o'r ymddangos iawn. as that. So just to give you some examples of what wetlands can offer us. They provide the habitat which supports the diversity of species. And they provide raw materials and raw resources like freshwater for example. So freshwater is one of our rarest resources. It's only 2.9% of all water is freshwater. So the freshwater that's held within these ..fawr hwnnw o'i dyfodol yn gweithio'r rhaglen. Yn ystod, mae gennych chi'n gweithio'r cyfnodd cyrbyn. Mae'n gyfnodd ar y maen nhw. Mae'r rhaglen yn rhanau ystod yn ymarfer y 5%... ..y'r cyfnodd cyrbyn yn y DU... ..y'r cyfnodd yw'r rhaglen yn ymgylchedd... ..y'r rhaglen yn y gweithio'r gwasanaeth grannog... ..y'r rhaglen yw'r UK. ac yn edrych yn oes i gael ei glos. Mae'r adynhau a'r adnod, mae'r adnodau a philgrinog, a'r adnodau a philgrinogau a'r adnodau. A gwybod yn fwy o'r adnod, yna'r adnodau, yn adnodau a philgrinogau. Felly, ac amdannu ar hyn oherwydd, I want to frame most of this talk very locally, I'm sure many of you come from the local area. This green light configuration is known as the Upper Thames floodplain. We're currently nestled just in this U-bend here in the centre of town. For those of you coming on the walk this afternoon, we're going to be heading into the floodplain down on Port Meadow. Now, I want to first emphasise that these floodplain areas are actually characterised by the winter flooding. For those of you who live locally, you're bound to have gone down to Port Meadow during the winter period when it has been flooded. And that is part of the natural exchange of nutrients in these systems. And it's obviously occurring during the dormant stage of these systems, so not during the reproductive period. Now, I want to concentrate on one particular area within this tributary, which is nestled down here on the west wing. And it's a site called Timney Meadow's Nature Reserve. And it belongs to the Berkshire, Buckinshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust. And it covers about 250 hectares, just over now because they've extended into a further field. And one particular community that resides in this area, the floodplain meadow, I'm going to want to focus down on that first of all. And under the National Vegetation Classification, some of you may not know what National Vegetation Classification was, but effectively it was a project carried out in the early 1990s by Professor Roddwell. And it was an incredible undertaking. Him and his team set out to classify all of our habitat communities as a way of focusing down our conservation efforts. And he came up with a series of habitat classifications. And the floodplain meadows ended up being a mesotrophic grassland four. So that's classified by Meadow, Foxtail and Greater Burnett grassland. Now, this grassland is extremely rare in the UK. It covers only 1,500 hectares. So it's extremely rare. One thing that you'll notice on the photograph is how fantastically dense it is and structurally complex. So this sort of speckling in the foreground, some of you may recognise as Breesomedia, so the quaking grass, which is quite a specialist of old hay meadows. And these species-rich meadows can contain roughly usually over 20 species per square metre. And this structural complexity is extremely important for the reasons I'm about to explain. So on the left-hand side, we have a representation of a very simple single structured sword. And as you can see, there's very little dynamism in this structure. And it supports only a few high-level species. Whereas if you look at the example on the right-hand side, there's much more structural diversity and it's much more species-rich. And you can see that it offers many more different areas, which we call niches, to host a whole array of higher-level species. So why is having better biodiversity important? Now this is a simple diagram of a food chain. And a food chain is simply the way that energy is passed between species. So in this lower section of the food chain, we have the primary producers that capture the sunlight, produce the food through photosynthesis. And that energy is passed up to the primary consumers, which gain their energy directly from the primary producers. This is a very, very simple food chain. It's only got two levels. And the black bars represent the numbers of each of the species. Now these very simple food chains are extremely susceptible to stochastic events, including events like flooding. Now by having diversity in the grassland sword, and here I'm contrasting just plain grassland species to a mixture, a much more sort of species-rich mixture. This is on arable land. And you can see simply the difference in the complexity of the food chains. You don't obviously have to try and work out any of these connections. It's just simply this is a very simple food chain, and this is a very complex one. And obviously you want to ask yourself, why is that important? Now the insurance hypothesis basically suggests that the higher the level of biodiversity that we have, the more that that basically protects us against potential stochastic events in the future, environmental change. And the reason that is because the more biodiversity you have, the more likely you will have species within that diversity that can adapt or are adapted to any particular environmental circumstance you wish to throw at them, whether it's flooding or increased temperatures. So if we allow this animation to continue, and you'll start seeing some of the primary producers disappearing, by the time we get to the white clover, which obviously was quite a large component of the primary producers, once that is lost, you can see the devastating effect it has on the higher level species. And that just emphasises the importance of complexity, which you will need to think about as we go through the rest of the talk. So there are two erroneous beliefs about flooding, which I'd also like to squash during this talk today. The first, and you will read this in some publications, that all flooding have environmental benefits, and that's simply not the case. And I will be demonstrating that with the data I will be showing you. First of all, the flood plain meadow communities that I've mentioned, they are extremely vulnerable to changes in water regime, nutrient regime, and they require very specialist vegetation management. So this balance is essential. Now, in terms of the hydrological requirements, there are the eco-hydrological guidelines for plant communities, which is generated through the Open University research work, and available freely online, if any of you are doing any management work yourselves. And this diagram just simply demonstrates across the months of the year what the ideal water level is for this community, for the flood plain meadow community, below the surface level. So there is a general preference, obviously, for there to be no water above the surface level. So when the water hit in 2007, so this is a photograph from chimney meadows in the first flood in July, and we were hit again in 2008. But you can see, obviously, from leaves on the tree, this is the peak of the reproductive period. So this had devastating knock-on effects for the species on this site. And the examples that I'll be giving you today, they ricochet and were very similar across the same sites all the way up the Thames. So to start with some of the botanics, the first impacts were noticed because I was carrying out various quadrat survey work. And we noticed a devastating drop of over 60% loss of the coverage of the key species which make it a flood plain meadow. So this is not a 60% drop of all species. What we're interested in is the species that make it a flood plain meadow. And across these areas are representing the 2007 and 2008 flooding. So that is a huge devastating impact. And it's not surprising that it was that devastating because when the flooding hit in July, much of the seed had already dropped from the vegetation. So much of the seed was actually washed out into the riverine systems. And that is why in the following year the resurgence of these species is so low. And I'm going to go into more detail about that in a bit later on. So the second aspect that they are extremely sensitive to is the nutrient regime. And specifically with the species-rich meadows, they require very low levels of phosphorus. So that's what we're going to be concentrating on. You can see from the green section on this map that it's generally between 0 and 1 grams per metre squared is the acceptable level for this community. Now this devastating photo was taken in the aftermath of the flooding. So once the water had receded, much later in the summer, we were left with this kind of snow-white algal scum. I mean it had such a strong algal smell that it really felt like you were at the seaside or something. It was quite surreal. But because the water had been so warm throughout the summer period, this algal bloom had developed. And of course this leaves behind it an extremely nutrient-rich algal scum. And the impacts of this deposition was actually monitored by Professor Gowing, who managed to get an urgent grant to assess the phosphorus deposition all the way across from the 7, which as you all know was badly affected right through across to the far end of the Thames. And chimney meadows was one of the sites that was actually monitored. And it was found that the phosphorus levels had been increased four-fold above what it would normally be. And this is extremely disconcerting because phosphorus, if you're trying to manage a site and you're trying to reduce the phosphorus levels, even if you remove the hay, you can only reduce the phosphorus by about 1% each year. So when you look at the scale of the 7 and you imagine how long it's going to take them to get those sites back into condition, it's quite a scary thought, at the very least. So the third main variable which affects these meadow areas is the vegetation management. So they require preferably an annual hay cut in July-August time and followed by grazing by preferably cattle. And unfortunately because of this algal scum that had developed, this had obviously impeded any ability to hay cut or any ability to graze. And in fact that was the case for over two years of the site in terms of the management. And so not only did you have the algal scum build up, but you also had all of this organic matter building up as well, which obviously had implications for the competitive plants trying to burst back through. It was extremely devastating and that was again reflected in the number of species emerging post-flooding. So again this is 2007, 2008 and there was an over 50% drop-off in the species emerging between before and after the flooding. And again, not only is it because the seas were washed into the riverine systems, but it's also because of this huge mat which was really impenetral for many of the less competitive species. So the second erroneous belief about flooding I would like to squash is that flooding does not adversely affect the soil, macro, invertebrate populations. And this is certainly again you'll see written in some documentation. Certainly at Chymlu Meadows the data we'd collected from pitfall trapping on the ground beetle and rove beetle data demonstrated an extremely dramatic 85% loss across those species groups so in abundance. That's a huge, huge impact. And if you think back to those original food chains that I showed you, you can imagine the knock-on effect for the higher level species with a loss and I'm going to come back to that later on. In terms of some of the other species that we lost at the site, Bumbus Rudurarius, some of you may know, is a priority conservation species and was nesting down at the National Nature Reserve section of Chymlu Meadows and that was completely lost. So those meadows were under at least a metre and a half of water for many, many weeks, at least eight weeks. And so all those nesting sites were completely destroyed. And sadly Bumbus Rudurarius has not returned to that site since. Sorry, it's a type of bumble bee. Sorry. The other key impact in terms of the invertebrate species was a 63% decline in the worm densities. And this in alignment with the loss of ground beetles had an ultimate impact on the number of breeding curlew. So we completely lost the breeding curlew from that site and no breeding curlew had been recorded at Chymlu since, sadly. And of course that is the key question, is how long will it take for these communities to reassemble. And there's various data looking at worm density and the data indicated 2.5 metres to 10 metres per year is the migration rate of worms. So we may be in for quite a long wait with some species and in terms of the beetles I'm going to show you a specific research project where we looked into this shortly. So in addition the grasshopper densities crashed by about 80% as well, that was a phenomenal crash. Obviously they feed on grasses so all of that as you saw from the other photographs was completely destroyed. And I do recall moving around the site by boat to check various areas and being inundated with all these various grasshoppers just jumping into the boat because they had obviously moved up to the scrub areas in the trees but sadly had nowhere else to go there was nothing to feed on, the grass had been destroyed and so many of these either died of starvation or obviously picked off by predators or we found very commonly they were attacked by fungal infections and passed away that way. So that's why although they may have initially survived the flooding we ultimately had a loss of about 80%. And interestingly in terms of the barn owl densities we saw a 50% drop off of them, not 100% and the reason was some of these high level meadows remained out of the water and what we think is obviously a lot of the small mammal populations were pushed into this area. So effectively it just came as fantastically dense larder for the barn owls. But sadly we did lose those breeding birds that were down on the lower section because on the island for instance let me just jump to the next slide this is just simply demonstrating the topography of the island so you've got the Thames proper coming around the outside and this is the Thames cut that was put in 1890 and this raised section here is effectively all the soil that they dumped out to the side so within 100 metres of the cut effectively the wood mice and field mice they survived in that area but in this whole section here this was completely inundated and all of those populations were lost and I know this because I had a master's student on those very populations at the time and so she was able to see that there was some survivor on the island but not enough to sustain there was a barn owl that had been nesting in the ashtray here so a massive impact across the site obviously I haven't gone through all of the different species but we don't have time today but I just wanted to give you a taster of some of the impacts and this is the key question because in terms of where we go from here in terms of adaptive management into the future if the prediction is for increased risk of flooding and especially more intense events potentially during the summer period the question is that if it takes 10 years for these communities to re-establish and yet these events may occur every 10 years then how viable are these habitats as we move forward in the future and it's a very important question especially for site managers and how they're going to deal with that so what are the potential solutions and what are the recovery rates well the inverted bridge surveys are being repeated next year so I won't have the data for you on that right now but in terms of the botanics over a four year period the recovery was still only two thirds of the original coverage of those key species for that community which in some ways seems quite positive actually but when you look at the next graph and you actually look at the number of species rather than just the coverage of that community well it's an absolute fraction of that and that's the issue so what's happened is that there have been a few more dominant maybe more competitive species amongst those key species that have literally spread out in the grassland but the whole complement is far from there and as you can see in four years there's just this tiny fractional recovery compared to the original coverage of these key species so it's definitely food for thought and of course the question is well if the community can't reside in that specific location then maybe it can be pushed elsewhere and so restoration and buffering and linking these sites is really going to be the key way to move forward and down at Chymni Meadows an arable reversion process took place started in 2004 and 70% of the higher level grounds remember the Thames is running along this southern edge here this is our National Nature Reserve and the Lower Wetland area so this is where the main section of the MG4 resided and this is where we were recreating fresh new meadows as a support and as a buffer to the National Nature Reserve and so this was carried out by removing green hay from the National Nature Reserve and spreading it out over these arable fields and effectively most of my work was looking at the effect of this on-going management and how successful this restoration project actually was and in each of the fields we had a control plot so where no green hay was spread and you can see that within that plot in the very outset it was certainly just a mixture of south thistle and creeping thistle and such like and there was quite a contrast with the rest of the field we didn't even know what species were in there and the rest of the field within 12 months had a baseline dry neutral grassland community which itself only has 5-10,000 hectares across the whole country so that was pretty spectacular to even achieve that in that short space of time and what I did was I had contrast plots at the National Nature Reserve so not only were we able to look at how well each of these fields were developing after the management and how they were progressing towards our target community which was where we took the green hay from in the first place down at the National Nature Reserve and across the first three years which was obviously pre-flooding you don't need to understand the details of this graph it's simply that across the three years you have the control that I've mentioned and the treatment and all this is asking is similar are these sites to the National Nature Reserve where the hay came from and there was an extremely significant result demonstrating a shift in those arable version of fields towards the target community across just three years which was phenomenal and obviously just in the nick of time because we'd created this baseline and then the flooding hit July 2007 so it is a classic example of why buffers are beneficial because if we hadn't carried out that reversion that National Nature Reserve would have been basically lost there was no buffering at all the nearest meadow to the National Nature Reserve was at least a several miles away but still even though we'd created that buffer and there was obviously an ability for species to shift up to that area and ultimately Timidee was still surrounded by an agricultural landscape and it's still isolated in many ways and vulnerable to change so though we've created 70 hectares yes they're still vulnerable and the intensity of the landscape around it needs to be dealt with and I'm going to talk a bit more about that shortly I just wanted to sort of revisit my historical aspect really where these sites started from so there were pioneers such as Charles Rothschild back in 1912 established the society for the promotion of nature reserves and basically they decided that why don't we go out there and find out the best places in the UK to preserve a biodiversity and it was effectively their work that led to the development of strategic statutory nature reserves which we now know as national nature reserves and the society for the promotion of nature reserves became what we would know as the wildlife trusts and so effectively it set the scene for how conservation was going to move forward at that point it was very revolutionary in its time but of course now those sites only cover 10% of the UK 70% of our land is agriculture so as fantastic as those sites may be they are still surrounded by a very intense environment and especially after the Second World War when there was obviously a push to increase crop production it led to degradation and fragmentation of many habitat sites and obviously therefore an increase in the isolation between these sites and what's important is the fact that the more isolated your sites you cannot have interchange of species between them so it means that it's very hard for populations to be viable in the long term and this is the key point that I now want to pick up so let's come out awfully bright so this is the Thames tributary again but all of these little coloured patches that are overlaid are either statutory reserves or local county wildlife sites or local reserves of the RSPB or wildlife trust and the first thing that should really strike you is how separated a lot of these sites are very fragmented across the landscape particularly obviously in the south east here it's obviously very built up and everything in between here is generally probably housing and such like so of course the issue is even if this is chimney again even if you do extend the existing sites the issue is the gaps between these sites may still be too large for many species to be able to cross and it's thinking about the sort of wider matrix which is a real fundamental focus on the strategy right now and thinking about how to move forward with conservation because many sites and many species are able to either fly in if so obviously birds some are able to balloon in some spiders can balloon in on silks and some species, zotra obviously can swim into sites unfortunately not all species are so lucky and some have life harder than others and this is the bloody-nosed beetle that some of you might already know so it's a market-need brykosa and this poor chap has to walk between sites and so in terms of the linking of the landscape for this particular species it's a very useful species to be able to look at fragmentation and look at permeability of the landscape so the data that we collected at chimney meadows is being part of a much wider study a multi-site landscape study that was led by Ben Woodcock from Centre of Ecology and Hydrology and effectively what we were asking was how does the quality of the habitats in the surrounding landscape affect the colonisation of these phytofagus beetles phytofagus just means they feed on grasses so how does this wider landscape impact and I think I'll just take you through this so this is a graph literally just comparing the restoration success of the plants when we generated our meadows against the restoration success of these beetles as you can see the graph is very messy there's no clear relationship at all that's obvious in this graph now there is a theory called the field of dreams probably all seen that movie that I remember when that was years ago and effectively the ideology of that was if you create it they will come and a lot of people within the conservation area fair enough before the evidence came to light thought that if you created the meadows the species will come and of course in terms of birds yes they will come in London Wetland Centre is a classic example of that they built that in the income of the birds but in terms of these phytofagus beetles that have to walk there's obviously not such a clear relationship there are barriers occurring that means they can't just suddenly appear when you create a meadow and so what we looked at was the proportion of species rich meadows in the surrounding landscape so how permeable is this landscape how easily can they move between there so we looked at the proportion of species rich grass in the landscape against the success of the beetles and there was a much sharper relationship there's obviously other variables going on and I won't have time to go into details today but the much sharper relationship which is obviously completely logical because if you're walking through an environment you need to have the right habitat to walk through otherwise it becomes a barrier so this connectivity is an extremely vital property of the landscape especially in the light of climate change species will need to be able to move between sites habitats will need to be able to shift as we extend sites and create buffers I mean many people think that species will always have to sort of be shifting northwards but when you think about say a hillside some species that reside on say the southern face could actually instead of moving 100km north to get a degree drop can actually just move up 130m I know we don't have many of those in Oxfordshire but we have some up and so it's about adapting your management to allow these shifts now the original ideology of having single sites and managing them has been completely revolutionised and these new approaches these landscape approaches are being led by organisations like the Wildlife Trust and they have a national programme called the Living Landscapes which effectively aims to restore, recreate and reconnect which is exactly everything that we've been talking through so far and they're doing that by connecting and partnering with local communities with schools, with businesses and importantly the land owners because as I've already mentioned 70% of our land is agriculture and it's absolutely vital that these land owners are on board if we are to develop this connectivity and linkage now a lot of the government schemes like the higher level schemes, entry level schemes financially support these sorts of management so if a farmer wants to undertake hedgerow management potentially plan to hedgerow to link two fields potentially to enhance a river system to allow more permeability then there is a financial support which is incredible so this direction is opening out loads of other organisations are obviously involved now also this is an example of one of the Living Landscapes in Berkshire, just over the border if you have chance you should go down and visit the Wildlife Trust are hopefully literally about to sign to take over the council sites as well which is absolutely incredible to add to the Living Landscape and what's what I like about the Berkshire Living Landscape is it emphasises the fact that it's not about creating just an open space of countryside it's about allowing that interchange between the built up areas and these greener areas as we go on the walk those of you that are joining us so it's about urban ecology and potential sympathetic management that people can do in their own gardens to enhance this landscape linking whether it's planting their own meadows or creating ponds and such like it allows those stepping stones for species even if they can't necessarily breed in your garden they might use you as a stepping stone to somewhere that they can and that is extremely crucial and all of this movement is backed up with the scientific literature and there's loads of freely available evidence-based reviews which you can look if you want to to read further about this so basically supporting the enhancement and connectivity approach and some of you may remember there was a government white paper that came out back in 2010 and John Lawton wrote, it was titled Making Space for Nature and effectively he was iterating how the wildlife trust and other organisations are effectively doing which is enlarging current sites and joining them together but it's bringing everything together now there's the scientific evidence that this is required there is the government support as well in terms of funding for the land owners and such like as well and then there's the owners from the NGO sector so just very quickly to close to bring it back to a local perspective I just wanted to sort of highlight the Thames Catchment Flood Management Plan area obviously we're just in Oxfordshire here and I wanted to highlight something that you, I don't know if any of you have actually read the plan but one of the quotes states we will identify locations where the storage of water would benefit communities by reducing flood risk and providing environmental benefits by increasing the frequency of flooding now after everything I have just said I hope that you completely disagree with that statement and the evidence is completely to the contrary now unfortunately one of their current proposed storage sites sits right on top of this very site I've just been talking about so you can recognise the outline here of too many meadows now these storage areas they are proposing as a last case scenario this is potentially 50 years, 70 years down the line but I am very thankful to say that it's not just their main focus obviously if flood storage becomes your main driver then how are you going to control these conditions potentially they could store water at any time of year whenever these statistic events happen those communities would be completely lost and it's fantastic to say that the environment agency are committed to trying to push forward with a natural flood management scheme so those flood storage areas are a last resort the focus really is to try and slow the water down in a much more subtle effect I'll give you some photographs in a second encourage, we call infiltration so I know that in the Netherlands they have these what called green waterways like grass waterways which are at the base of fields and it means when there's a flash event it will quickly take the water through without cutting across all of the agricultural site which would whip a lot of soil and nutrients across with it so there are ways and means planting forestry within sort of cut-throughs where big water surges can happen as well that's taking place and obviously this supports the natural processes and ecosystems we don't want massive engineering anymore it's not going to allow that natural connectivity and all these vital ecosystem services to take place so this is an example of these kind of softwares sort of integrated wetland features these are a series of scrapes and ponds that have been set up at chimney meadows and again these are supported by these government schemes so many farmers that I know locally have also created their series of scrapes and such like to help with the landscape linkage and so I just threw this photograph up just because it brings us back down closer to homes obviously we're going to for those of you coming on the walk we'll be going down to Port Meadow which is just right within this floodplain area so I just wanted to say thanks to obviously the Wildlife Trust and Ben Woodcock from CEH and Professor going from the Open University so thank you very much and I just kind of left five minutes so that we can have some questions and discussion cos I'm particularly interested in your take on flood storage and if you've got any personal experiences of this process or anything so I will open up to the floor Are there any schemes to scoop up beetles from one site and transport them to another site? There's not at the moment the current sign of the evidence it really doesn't support translocation of beetles it's not effective enough and various methods have been contrasted from sort of taking turf cutting and translocating that across and they have not been effective and they've been done on quite large scales as well so although there's some evidence for other species obviously being translocated particularly sections of grassland itself and taken across but the evidence is not there unless it just hasn't been done on a large enough scale and then of course it comes down to the cost issue invariably but no, translocation doesn't seem to work I mean obviously you have to make sure you have the right conditions for those species and the right habitat unless you literally translocate the whole thing itself which costs a huge amount of money at the moment that's very difficult The community I think I'm defined by Foxtail and Greater Burnett how do you actually pick which plants define the community? Well that's where John Rodwell's work came in so the phenomenal piece of work they did at the early 1990s they basically did over 2,000 quadriaths and basically compared the content and effectively were able to petition out and say well these are all very similar they contain these constant species these are very similar they contain these constant species and then they put labels to them and they just noted that there were dominant those two species were quite dominant what's interesting is that chimney we never had Greater Burnett and what they recognize now and the floodplain partnership which is a fantastic organization are at the moment looking into sub-communities Of course one could argue that as climate changes of course those original classifications are going to completely shift which is very unfortunate given the phenomenal piece of work that that was back in its day but that's just a reality so there is the question of when you have these target communities what does that mean anymore because if the species content is going to shift because some have to potentially be more tolerant to flooding events then yes we have to be very careful within the conservation field not to just say we want it to be MG6 or MG7 and such like for that reason really there's got to be some flexibility that national nature reserve was more of a crossover between MG4 and MG5 which is the floodplain meadow and the giant neutral grassland but both rare but they are sort of loose classification as we are recognising the flexibility in those communities and of course as some communities have been wiped out by flooding the species that recolonize are not necessarily the same species and in terms of ecosystem services one could argue well it doesn't have to be a specific species that does that job as long as somebody does it so in terms of our human benefits as long as our species colonizes that can break down that feces then why does it matter if it's one and not the other that's a very basic level of looking at it but that's why communities are very different so if you look at one MG4 grassland and look at the beetles contained within that and look at a completely different area yes there are similarities but they are never exactly the same no ecosystem is stable they are always fluxing in different areas but it is a really interesting dilemma that everybody has especially as we move forward now so sorry what are your questions here what are your kids particularly the green wind affected by the flooding and have they recovered since then yes that's right that's right because you came down with the group and they were there they have not been seen since sadly I did so Lisa Lane is now managing the site and yes they said that they haven't seen them this year so we hold out hope that they may return in time again some of the species may be there but the conditions might not be right to emerge yet but they had a good population down there the fatilleries interestingly have emerged in great glory we only ever had a few plants and they've obviously gone wild because the area is so moist they've done exceptionally well although the green wings have gone dormant for a while the fatilleries have come through in great strength so again it's quite interesting sorry there's a question just a very quick question about habitat management not specific to flood claim but you mentioned after Marth grazing preferably cattle and I've read this before cattle are different to get hold of how horses compare with cattle horses and sheep together is better than just horses I mean thinking of the evidence base and just while I'm talking about the evidence base actually if you go to conservationevidence.com there is a build up of freely available evidence so I suggest you look at that and environmentalevidence.com as well so those two sites is basically aware because obviously we is recognised that not everyone has access to the scientific data that is effective and what's not and so the idea in these sites and particularly the conservation evidence site they're trying to build up a series of synopsis which said what's the best management for birds what's the best management for X, Y and Z and it's fantastic and they're hoping to review them every two years and it will be a great way for site managers to be able to access this exact kind of information so the best is cattle just because the way that they graze it creates a much more dynamic towards structure which again starts with that complexity and therefore enhances the biodiversity sheep graze very uniformly and that's why you would only use them so the reversion that we carried out because you start with a very open root system you definitely don't want cattle or horses on at that stage because they would just destroy the root system so it depends on the level of your management so in those early stages because the root system was so open we had to use sheep because they're much lighter fitted and then after the first four or five years the root system had closed over then we brought in the cattle to start generating this fantastic variation so you have to tailor it to what you're actually undertaking but horses on their own have not been demonstrated because they leave huge sections it's not like cattle where they have nice mixed tussocks because of this defecation and urination they won't go really anywhere near it so that you get whole sections because I had tried to use ponies in the past but I worked when I alternated ponies and sheep within the same area to get the mix ultimately and also you've got the whole thomentics effect on invertebrates as well and that's a whole different story but that is an issue if they're defecating within the field it could impact on your invertebrate population depending on this treatment for worms basically and another so you've been trying to manage a site well I think the difficulty is of course actually getting hold of about any sheep in parts of Oxfordshire and that anybody wants to put in a small field but it's worthwhile contacting the local wildlife trust because as part of the living landscape programs it might be that because they have their own sheep and cattle and such that as well it's always worth asking because if it's a way of enhancing the management of the whole landscape then that's what the living landscape programs all about so I would definitely approach them fantastic well I've gone five minutes over time I'm kind of aware we've all got to dash and going to meet Jocelyn and such so thanks ever so much for coming