NVC Assessment

Stuart Hedley recently completed an NVC (National Vegetation Classification) assessment of The Meadowlands. This is an attempt to best map the landscape according to plants found in each area against a list of plant communities known to exist in Britain.

NVC Map produced by Stuart Hedley

To decode the map a little, MG5 means unimproved neutral grassland, which is the good stuff, the grassland you want. This is grassland that hasn’t been smothered with fertilisers so it’s nutrient poor (best for wildflowers), and it hasn’t been reseeded with grasses for farming or overgrazed. You can see we have a few pockets of this grassland on the southern and northern edges of the farm. These are our most diverse fields, rich in wildflowers. Part of this runs over a band of Chapel Point Calcrete, a calcarerous bedrock that makes this area even richer botanically.

Then there is MG6 and MG7 improved grassland. These are grasslands dominated by Perennial Ryegras Lolium perenne, which is commonly used by farmers to reseed fields and make them more productive for agriculture. You’ll see in the map above that these are the dominant NVC communities at The Meadowlands.

We have a few other habitat types like W7, W8 and W10 which are different types of woodland, M23 (rush pasture) and M27 (mire) which are our wetter areas, and MG9 and MG10 which are poorly-drained grasslands.

How MG5 grassland has been lost at The Meadowlands

When MG5 grassland has been lost through improvement to MG6/7 grassland there are two main options conservationists pursue to create better habitat - restore the meadows back to MG5 or rewild towards wood pasture. We’ve chosen the latter because we think it will create a habitat that is better for birds and invertebrates. Meadows are brilliant for plants, but the practice of cutting is very destructive for invertebrates and birds. It would also be a lot of work to arrange a hay cut for 40 hectares of MG5/6 grassland each year and find someone that wants the hay!

The NVC assessment gives us a really useful baseline so we can see what the site looked like when we first took it on, and monitor how it changes with the actions we are taking.