PoMS and ‘messy nature’ close to home
Inspired by the many community-based initiatives dedicated to nature recovery and peoples’ wellbeing, and especially those that have been in touch with UK PoMS over the past year, I have been reflecting on activities closer to home.
In a village close to PoMS HQ, the local wildlife group has been involved in a project to create a community meadow on the village green. The group put a proposal to the Parish Council in 2021 to run a three-year trial that would align closely with its obligations under the (then new) Environment Act, operating in England, to consider actions to conserve and enhance biodiversity.
Community meadow with knapweed and wild carrot thriving, July 2024.
We first reduced the mowing regime on the green, allowing the grasses and any other plant species to grow and set seed for the first time in many years. As this resulted in such a dominance of tall grasses and very little else, permission was granted to scarify a wide sunny area at the back of the green and sow a wildflower mix containing 16 native species (including yellow-rattle, oxeye daisy and black knapweed). Since then it has been managed as a traditional meadow would have been, including with a fabulous day of scything and hay raking in late summer, followed by monthly mowing through the autumn and winter. The cover and diversity of wildflowers on the meadow area has more than doubled in two years, bringing a wealth of colour and opportunities for insects and other wildlife to move in. Information boards have been provided, and wide paths are mown regularly around the perimeter and meandering through the meadow, keeping the area looking ‘cared for’ and encouraging people to venture in and enjoy it through the season.
However, while many have embraced the change, there are several in the community who would rather see year-round short green turf, and feel their ideal image of a well-kept village is somehow at odds with this shift towards a more natural management regime. The concept of ‘messy nature’ close to home is, it seems, far from being widely accepted. On reflection, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this mixed reaction to the wilder aesthetic. There is certainly more we can, and should be, doing to engage the whole community in this project, and plans are already in motion to run pollinator discovery sessions during 2025, introducing people to the diversity of plants and insects now inhabiting this community space and to the FIT Count survey. I have been inspired by all the wonderful local FIT Count projects now linked to PoMS, including the Kingston University Biodiversity group, Pollinating London Together, the Bradley Bug Recovery Network and Pollinators Along the Tweed to name just a few. You can read more about each of these in the links provided. Our aim is to further develop this ‘projects’ feature and other facets of the FIT Count app in the coming years, to provide more regular and engaging real-time data updates and feedback to all participants, hoping to encourage their continued involvement in the scheme.
I was reminded of our village green exchange at the recent annual meeting of the British Ecological Society (BES) in Liverpool. More than 1500 ecologists, among them students, established research scientists, practitioners and policy makers, gathered to share ideas, spark new conversations and offer career guidance. One plenary lecture that made a lasting impression on me was delivered by Rob Fish, Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Imperial College London, a social scientist and human geographer by training. He spoke passionately about his research on the social and cultural dimensions of managing our natural resources and featured a recent paper entitled “Messy natures: The political aesthetics of nature recovery”1. This gives great insight into the concept of ‘messiness’ in nature recovery, and challenges us all to think more carefully about how idealisations of ‘how nature should look’ may influence decision-making alongside ecological and other considerations.
It was also wonderful to meet a student at the BES presenting a poster on her project using FIT Counts to study insect visitation to Himalayan balsam and nearby wildflowers in different local floral contexts. Her enthusiasm for spreading the word on FIT Counts was infectious and I am sure those she has engaged with will have benefitted from their encounter far beyond the ability to contribute data to PoMS. I would like to extend warm thanks to everyone who has given their support and enthusiasm to the scheme this year, from the core team of partners and funders to the local project co-ordinators and hundreds of volunteers submitting data, the taxonomists behind the scenes and landowners allowing access for the 1 km surveys. Thank you all!
As we approach Christmas and the end of the eighth survey year for UK PoMS, it seems worth reflecting once more on our collective achievements to date. Including the latest surveys from 2024, more than 20,500 FIT Counts and over 1,730 1 km survey visits with pan trap samples have been submitted, with the vast majority coming from volunteers! We may still be some distance away from the size and scale of datasets generated by other insect monitoring schemes, such as the long-established UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. However, the data received and processed for UK PoMS to date have allowed us to start developing analytical methods and approaches to deriving new annual metrics of change, which will eventually be proposed as Official Statistics to help the Government track pollinator status at national scale. Look out for more detail in our next Annual report and regular e-newsletters.
Wishing all of my PoMS team colleagues, our volunteers and followers a very happy Christmas and a healthy and peaceful new year.
Claire Carvell, December 2024
1Wartmann, F. M., & Lorimer, J. (2024). Messy natures: The political aesthetics of nature recovery. People and Nature, 6, 2564–2576. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10743