In June 1992, the UK was among 150 countries to sign up to the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Earth Summit in Rio. Following up from this, the government produced a UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) which set out conservation measures necessary to protect our most important species and habitats. These were selected on the basis of their international rarity and /or their rarity or rate of decline in the UK. The UK Action Plan also concluded that biodiversity would only be effectively conserved if action was also taken at a local level. It recommended that local authorities should prepare BAPs for their own areas which included not only the national priorities identified by the UK Plan, but also species and habitats considered to be locally important.
Exmoor's
Biodiversity Action Plan
The National Park Authority has now prepared a draft local
Biodiversity Action Plan. Exmoor is a very rich area for wildlife, and many of the priority habitats
and species identified by the UK Plan are found here. This has made the selection of the most important
ones very difficult and it is envisaged that a second group of habitat and species plans will need to
be added later this year. In the end, seven habitats and seven species were selected for inclusion in
the Exmoor BAP. These are as follows:
Species
Dormouse
Nightjar
Heath Fritillary Butterfly
High Brown Fritillary
Whitebeams
Lungwort Lichens
Ballerina wax-cap
Habitats
Upland Heath
Lowland Heath
Blanket Bog
Upland Oaks Woods
Parklands, Wood Pastures and Veteran Trees
Bracken & Scrub
Un-improved Grassland
The
Plan
The Plan will be the subject of extensive consultation with a range of interested
individuals and organisations. Only by achieving consensus and co-operation with our many partners will
the National Park Authority be able to achieve the objectives set out in the Plan.
As its name suggested, the Exmoor BAP is very much focussed on action, with each Plan listing a series of tasks necessary to protect the particular species or habitat. It is an aim of the actions in the Plan not only to maintain the size and quality of priority habitats and species populations, but to increase and enhance them by 2010.
Exmoor National Park Authority BAP Leaflet
Exmoor National Park Authority BAP Report
Exmoor's Biodiversity newsletter June 2004 (1.3MB, PDF)
Exmoor's Biodiversity newsletter June 2005 (4MB, PDF)
Bats (PDF, 60kb)
Farmland
(PDF, 64kb)
Rivers and Streams (PDF, 60kb)
Ballerina
wax-cap
This beautiful toadstool gets its name from its pink frilly cap, which
bears some resemblance to a ballerinas tutu. It is one of a group of fungi known as wax-caps, which
occur in grasslands and which are often brightly coloured in various shades of red and yellow. A recent
survey by the Somerset Wildlife Trust has shown that Exmoor abounds with these beautiful fungi. They
require unimproved grasslands and most species quickly disappear from grasslands that have been ploughed
or fertilised recently. They also require a relatively close-cropped sward, and thus continued grazing
of sheep and cattle is crucial to their survival.
The ballerina wax-cap is considered vulnerable to extinction in Britain, primarily due to the loss of its habitat and is it included as a priority species in the national BAP list. In Britain unimproved grassland has declined by a staggering 95% since 1940. On Exmoor, losses have not been quite so acute, primarily due to the steep nature of the valley sides, which made ploughing impossible. The ballerina wax-cap seems to have a major stronghold here, with eight sites currently being known and we have a major role to play in ensuring the survival of this species in Britain.
Whitebeams
Exmoor
supports seven species of whitebeams, close relatives of the more familiar rowan or mountain ash. All
are endemic, that is to say they are not found outside of Britain, with three of the species being confined
in their world distribution to just the North Devon and Exmoor coast. This makes their conservation
here of the utmost importance. They are small shrubs or trees with showy clusters of white flowers in
May and berries in autumn which are either red, orange or brown in colour depending on the species.
The leaves of some species have a characteristic silvery felt on the under surface which is one of the
best ways of spotting them in the dense oak woods which they generally frequent.
They usually occur on steep rocky slopes where there is less competition from taller trees like oak. Because of this requirement, they are largely restricted to the Exmoor coast, where they occur all the way from North Hill in the east to Wild Pear Beach in the west. The main concentrations are in old coastal oak woodlands such as Watersmeet, Woody Bay and Culbone. The main threat to their survival is through shading out of the sites in which they grow by competing trees and the invasion of rhododendron, which prevents the establishment of the next generation of young whitebeams to replace the old when they die.
High
brown fritillary
The high brown fritillary is a handsome tawny orange butterfly
with a pattern of black spots on the upper side of the wings and a network of beautiful silvery spots
on the lower surface. At the turn of the century it was quite common throughout England and Wales, but
has subsequently declined by 94% in its range, so that at the present time it is confined to three strongholds,
on Dartmoor, Exmoor and in south Cumbria, and a scatter of sites in Wales and the Borders.
It formerly occurred in woods that were coppiced, but when this management practice became uneconomic and began to die out, the woods became to cool and shady for the butterfly and it disappeared. Only in a handful of woods where management has persisted, and on some south-facing bracken slopes has the butterfly hung on. The latter habitat is now much the most important one for the butterfly in Britain, and all the Exmoor colonies occur in dense bracken stands on sunny, south-facing valley sides where there is an abundance of the caterpillar's food plant, dog violet. It is ironic that one of our rarest species occurs in bracken, a habitat that up until a few years ago was regarded by both landowners and conservationists alike as an invasive and undesirable "weed".
Parklands,
wood pastures and veteran trees
Parklands and wood pastures are essentially man
made landscapes designed to allow animals to graze whilst at the same time producing timber from pollarded
trees. Pollarding is a process where branches are cut from the tree above the point to which grazing
animals can reach, which allows the tree to grow back. It also tends to rejuvenate the tree, and old
pollard oak, ash and beech can live to many hundreds of years in age. These huge, stately "veterans"
were also deliberately retained by estate owners, who valued them for their beauty in the parkland landscape.
This combination of factors means that in Britain we have more veteran trees than most other European
countries and consequently a special duty to protect them. On Exmoor, approximately 1,000 veteran trees
have been recorded, with concentrations in old pasture woods and parks such as Nettlecombe, Dunster
Deer Park and Cloutsham Ball.
In addition to their considerable intrinsic value and their historical interest, veteran trees host a huge variety of other wildlife. Woodpeckers and other woodland birds find both nest sites in holes and an abundance of insect food in the dead wood with which such trees are usually riddled. Many of these insects are of conservation interest in their own right and include a host of rare and threatened species such as the formidable-looking stag beetle. A number of bat species also establish their nurseries in holes in old trees and find the beetle-rich environment ideal for their nocturnal feeding forays. Lastly, veteran trees host hundreds of different types of fungi and lichens, with old trees on Exmoor being especially important for the latter group.