Summer 2018

 June

The sward is knee-high now:

Looking south towards block A (June 2018)

 June is the month when you really start to get a strong visual expression of the diversity in these limestone grasslands.  Even in early June, the sward is thickly dotted with a rich variety of flower colours, sizes and shapes.  

 

 

There is a good show of some of the less commonly considered flowers found in calcareous grasslands, including those of broomrapes and grass species.  Although they are superficially reminiscent of orchids, broomrapes are parasitic species that don't contain any chlorophyll, and so are unable to photosynthesise.  They get their nutrition by tapping in to the roots of other plant, often strongly restricted to specific host plants such as knapweed, ivy and some grass species.

Broomrape

Pyramidal orchid

Grasses are wind-pollinated, and produce a huge amount of pollen - this makes working in grasslands in summer a real trial if you (like me) suffer from hayfever.

By late June, the colour and structure of the sward had changed again, and was becoming dominated by seeding bodies rather than flower organs.  This is the stage that the biomass harvest is taken, in order to assess the influence of the experimental manipulations (rainfall and nitrogen addition) on the  productivity of the functional (plant) groups. 

 

Looking east; block B is nearest, block C is at distance. June 2018.

The June surveys and biomass harvests conclude the data collection I am doing for my PhD, though RainDrop will continue to run, and will continue to be monitored to build a long-term dataset for this plant community.  

 Collecting data is only one part of this kind of research - albeit arguably the most enjoyable aspect - and I now move into the next step, which is the deeper analysis of the data, and the development of credible interpretations of what that data is telling me. I have a strong impression that the vegetation on site is distinctly different to how it was when I first arrived, over three years ago, and an equally strong impression of differences between rainfall treatments.  Once I have tackled some of the analysis, I hope to be able to describe those differences in a more objective way!  

 More on that later.... for now, I'm just happy to have been able to spend so much time in this very special corner of the UK, in this very special habitat.  I've even learned to ID some grass species!