In the Field ARC Life in Lockdown By Bryony Davison - Weald Field Officer In response to government advice, all ARC staff began working from home at the end of March. Our field teams had to abandon fieldwork and fill their time with office and admin work. During the month of May, ARC senior management, in discussion with other wildlife organisations, decided that some of our outdoor work could resume. Our important on-site work cannot be carried out from home ,so when we are outdoors, we continue to ensure that we follow health and safety guidelines and adhere to government social distancing rules. I have used the extra office time (my laptop in my living room) to catch up on the things I haven’t had time to do over the winter, which is our busiest habitat management season. I have collated last year’s survey data and written monitoring reports, among other things. Now we have been given permission to carry out certain site tasks, I have been doing some reptile surveys which will inform our practical management later on in the year. The picture on the right is an adder I spotted on a recent survey. I have also been out refreshing some of our bare ground scrapes. We have prioritised the scrapes that have become most overgrown as without our attention, the sand lizards would have to find suboptimal places to dig egg burrows or may not breed at all.
Photo: Adder © Bryony Davison
Ralph Connolly Weald Field Officer & Volunteer Coordinator
In the Field
One of the solo site monitoring activities that has still been possible to carry out is our fixed-point photography long-term monitoring programme.
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I have a range of photography posts set up across our Wealden sites from which myself and volunteers take twice yearly landscape shots (in spring and autumn) to record habitat changes. Over time this will build up
Gong Hill 2020 © ARC
a database of images to show how quickly a particular area of heath is being overgrown by scrub or how well a bare sand scrape is regenerating for example.
Gong Hill 2017 © ARC
In the case of these two images taken in 2017 and 2020 at Gong Hill, they show the gradual recovery of an area of heather that was destroyed by fire in 2015.
