Youth Leadership Group 2 day Site Visit December 2021

The Youth Leadership Group had a wild and windy weekend at Wild Garsdale Pike in December! They met Non our ecologist from Bowland Ecology and had an introduction to our baseline surveys. Bowland Ecology are carrying out a Phase 1 Habitat Survey and a National Vegetation Classification Survey on the land. Non introduced the group to how they are going about this and then, working in 3 smaller groups, we set out up the hill to do some peat probing and quadrat work.

It was wild and windy out there …..

But braving the wind and rain was worth it because we found that the peat was over 1 metre deep in places and we also found some great indicator species in the quadrats …..

We spent the afternoon in the nice warm youth hostel where Non showed us how to upload our data on to QGIS. The really interesting thing which emerged from this was that close to the grips and gill the peat depth dropped from over a metre to around 400mm – a really good illustration of how the grips and increasing the water run off from the bog has damaged the peat.

Later the group did some great presentations of their areas of interest: Native Trees, Indicator Speicies and Conservation Grazing …..

and in the evening they added the new information they had found to the map they created in August ….

On Sunday we went to Wild Haweswater to find out about this project and look in particular at the new tree planting, the tree guards they’re using and the meadows. We also met some very friendly fell ponies, who were very happy to tell us all about conservation grazing in practice! ….