Plants

© Mike Dodd

Plants

Recording vegetation is a primary monitoring tool used for assessing grassland quality, measuring subtle changes in plant community and reporting against agri environment agreements. Vegetation can also tell you a lot about underlying problems with soil fertility, wetness and structure. Therefore becoming familiar with the key indicator species of floodplain meadows is really helpful.

There are a range of methods used to monitor vegetation, some of which are more specialist than others. The method you choose depends on the outcome you need. With a little bit of self teaching you can undertake Priority Habitat Inventory (PHI) recording without too much extra help. Recording full quadrats is more specialist and takes more intensive training. For this, you may need the help of a botanist. 

Key resources

 

Become familiar with key indicator species

The following photo carousels show you key species found in floodplain meadows and what they are telling you about your site.

In the same way, other plants can tolerate a wider range of conditions and can therefore act as indicators to show you when the site is moving away from the ideal necessary to support a species rich meadow. Plants that indicate soil compaction, high soil fertility and waterlogging can be found below. Use these to help you identify if there is a problem on your site that will limit your ability to restore it.

 Plant recording methods

 

Recording full quadrats

Quadrats are 1 x 1 m square areas within a field that are used to record more detailed botanical information. If you can record a minimum of 5 quadrats in your field, within the same plant community type, then you can gather a lot more information about soil water levels, soil fertility and management. You can also use quadrats to see how your plant diversity changes over time if you return to record in roughly the same locations each year, or every few years. However, you need to be able to identify every species of plant (including grasses) within each quadrat, and for each species you need to allocate a percentage abundance.

We use quadrats in our research, both for long term monitoring and for assessing the impacts of management trials. Our Meadows Database contains thousands of quadrats.

See our botanical monitoring protocol to see how to set up quadrats across a meadow to learn more about how the hydrology and plant communities are related.

Recording for the Priority Habitat Inventory (PHI) (England)

The PHI is a dataset managed by Natural England to record the location of all priority habitats in England. Lowland meadows are a priority habitat and floodplain meadows are considered to sit within the Lowland Meadow Priority Habitat. All fields registered on the PHI are plotted onto MAGIC and available to view here.

You may need to have your field registered as a Priority Habitat before you can access stewardship agreements and other funding. 
The method used to assess PHI status is based on recording certain indicator species at approximately 20 locations across the field, and recording some basic information about the presence of negative indicator species and sward height.

Photo of someone looking at grass with an eye glass