Some 48 Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) areas in England are currently writing their strategic plans for the next 3-10 years. These strategies are expected to be used extensively by local authorities planning departments and others, as nature recovery is being pushed forward on the agenda in all parts of society. Writing these strategies is a fantastic opportunity for botanist and botanical societies to contribute expertise, in particular about the distribution of plant species that are red-listed or of local significance.
For about half of England, these areas coincide more or less with the old Watsonia vice counties, which should facilitate identifying what species is present today or has been present historically. However, for the other half, this work is significantly complicated by a mis-match in boundaries. I have experienced this difficulty when looking at bryophytes, charophytes and vascular plant of nature recovery interest for the Tees Valley LNRS.
One key element of LNRS that botanist and botanical societies can contribute to, is when drafting longlists and priority list of species. Interpreting and comprehending the guidance can be overwhelming. However, botanists are in a particularly good position to showcase years of excellent systematic recording, providing good distributional data, and to apply the methodology outlined in the guidance, given that we have excellent, recent, IUCN-standard red lists, and in many places some of BSBI’s rare plant registers.
I am inviting anyone involved as a botanist in drafting elements of LNRS to get in touch with me as I expect that sharing experience could:
- Make our work more efficient and accurate
- Showcase better the value of botanical societies recording scheme
- Provide practical peer-support
In order to facilitate this process, the BBS Recorder, Oli Pescott, has produced a spreadsheet of BBS species BBS species hectad counts by vice-county and Red List status. This is available as a download below.
Ambroise Baker
Email: a.baker@tees.ac.uk