Nature
Melwood - Your Local Nature Reserve Winter Senescence? The trees are now all bare branches but the leaves which have fallen will provide important nutrients for the next generation of plants in the wood. We therefore leave the leaf cover generally undisturbed – just brush, cutting the verges of the paths and raking the cuttings to provide additional mulch for the more sheltered areas in the wood. This also provides a protective covering for the young shoots in the spring and a good habitat for insects which sit towards the bottom of the food chain, and are therefore important for all the animals living in and visiting the wood. Bird visitors will have arrived and settled in for their winter stay. They will then return north in the late spring. We hope that the home population will use the nest boxes which have been cleaned out for them during the winter. Dead wood from fallen branches and dead trees is also an important component of the forest cycle of decay and regeneration. Up to a fifth of woodland species rely on dead or dying wood for all or part of their life-cycle. Dead wood also plays a part in mitigating the effects of climate change by acting as a medium-term sink for carbon. Over the long term dead wood should amount to roughly 20m3 per hectare. We therefore follow the dead wood management guidelines published by the Forestry Commission in dealing with death wood in Melwood. However, there is always a balance to be struck between producing an optimal conservation environment and ensuring the wood can be enjoyed by a variety of individuals, including children, regularly using the space. We try and ensure that no dead or dying wood is a danger to the visitors or spoils the visual aspects of the site. We therefore regularly inspect the wood after serious storms and take appropriate action if there are any trees or branches which might fall and injure someone. There is also another tricky balance between the ultimate conservation value of dead wood and the shorter-term risks of providing resources for damaging bark and wood-boring insects and fungal pathogens. In our wood the risks of serious damage from insects or pathogens is small, although we recently monitored the wood for the presence of ash die back, which thankfully did not take hold. The wood has been grateful for volunteers since its ‘adoption’. Through the local history group, we have recently come across accounts of guides, scouts and brownies involved in helping in the wood. There was an initiative by the guides when Sheila Payne was the Guide Guider at the time (she later changed her name back to Bishop). In the late 1980s the Guide movement started an initiative to encourage girls to be involved in caring for parts of their community and environment. The name of the project was ‘Adopt
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and Cherish’, the idea being that Guides would not just do something to enhance their local environment, but would take responsibility for maintaining whatever it was that they did. Most of the work in Melwood was focused on planting daffodils –The ‘cherish’ part of the challenge was to keep the area litter-free. Unfortunately, we no longer have any Guides, Brownies or Scouts involved but we have maintained a group of volunteer litter pickers. There has also been a team of Duke of Edinburgh Award students from Melbourn Village College keeping the flower tubs at Meldreth Station watered during this very dry summer. So the spirit of volunteering is still strong in the young. Sadly, the photograph below also had a newspaper report describing vandalism in the wood in 1982 involving the work of the scouts and guides. A log table made by the scouts was damaged and some of the daffodils that had been planted were uprooted. Pieces of wood from the table were found floating in the river. Thankfully we have not had any serious vandalism in recent years following an initiative from the Melwood Conservation Group working with Melbourn Village Collage and the youth club to encourage an understanding that the wood is there to enjoy but also respect. We have a small team of enthusiastic volunteers, but we always welcome more. If anyone is interested in helping to preserve this local habitat, please contact Graham Borgonon on 01763 260358 or Jim Reid on 260231.
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