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Nature Recovery Committee update

In June, the Nature Recovery Committee (NRC) spent an enjoyable and very informative afternoon at three of our nature reserves. The meeting brought together the NRC members and key staff to discuss challenges and opportunities around reserve management.
The Nature Recover Committee and staff visiting North Cave Wetlands

The Nature Recover Committee (NRC) is a new committee of the Board whose remit is to advise both staff and the Board on our core business, i.e. conserving and enhancing nature in Yorkshire.

The Committee comprises 4 trustees and 4 external members, and is attended by the relevant senior staff. The external members bring us new perspectives and expertise and have already shown their value in precisely that way.

Our meetings have mainly been by Zoom/Teams, but one of our roles is to advise on reserve management and to act as an assurance to the Board that the reserves are in good health. To do that we have instituted a series of site visits

The first of our site visits was on 10 June, when we visited three East Region reserves: North Newbald Becksies, Northcliffe Wood and North Cave Wetlands. These were chosen in consultation with David Craven (Regional manager - East) to offer very different management issues. We were guided on site by the reserve manager, Tony martin, and Living Landscapes Officer, Jon Traill, whose deep knowledge of the reserves was evident and critical to our discussions.

A view of North Newbald Becksies. There is long green grass and wildflowers and a yellow meadow on the horizon in the distance.

At only 2ha North Newbald Becksies is a small reserve. It comprises a series of springs where water emerges from the chalk at the foot of the Wolds, but it has suffered severe eutrophication because the land from which the water is gathered is all now intensive arable.

Much of the site is now dominated by vigorous stands of meadowsweet, crowding out everything else. How one best manages a site that is subject to such intense external pressures is a question that will arise almost everywhere as the impact of climate breakdown is increasingly felt.

We moved onto Northcliffe Wood, a much larger site (33 ha) which is a mixture of oak woodland and remnant heath. It’s surprising to find heathland at the foot of the chalk escarpment, but the band of acid sands that runs north-south there once supported an extensive area of heathland.

Here we saw both a threat – eutrophication again, this time probably from aerial nitrogen deposition which is driving the site to grass heath rather than true heath – and an opportunity: our reserve is close to another SSSI, South Cliffe Common. Is there a chance here of a landscape enhancement programme?

North Cave Crosslands Hide

(C) Jim Horsfall

Just a couple of km south is North Cave Wetlands, a very different reserve and a fine example of both habitat creation and of partnership with the private sector, with lessons being learnt on both sides.  The success of North Cave in attracting birds is indubitable; can we build on that by linking the site to the adjacent habitats and by habitat diversification?

The NRC is at a very early stage in understanding the challenges our reserve network poses, but this sets of visits was enlightening and will help us ensure we can offer a useful sounding board to the reserve teams and gave us critical insights as we work to aid the development of the new Nature Recovery Strategy.  We shall be making more such visits, at least annually, and welcome suggestions from reserve teams as to sites we might visit, where we can learn about the issues and challenges, and also contribute to the development of management plans.
 
Please contact either Sharne McMillan (sharne.mcmillan@ywt.org.uk), Strategy Manager and Secretary to the committee, if you would like to make suggestions or to know more about what we are doing.

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