The Holy Loch Nature Reserve is a rare piece of land that has had little human disturbance for over 150 years. Its commercially ungrazed saltmarsh and flower-rich meadows are interspersed by several water courses and vegetated gravel ridges. The marsh?s dozens of pools are fed only by rainwater and spring tidal, seawater inundations, every one unique in shape, depth, height above sea level and salinity levels. The rest of the reserve comprises sea-facing, mixed-species, temperate rainforest and carr woodland that has regenerated atop a historical landfill. Where burns have become blocked, swampy, reedy habitat provides a home to many specialist organisms. The Food Web Project was established in 2022 to assess the reserve?s species richness, to define its ecological interactions, and, ultimately, measure the health of its ecosystem. With the reserve species check-list being added to all the time, we are now well along the route to a simple, tablet-based approach for recording species in the field. This project is informing an ecology-led management plan for the reserve as it faces an uncertain future due to global heating and associated sea level rises. We envisage the reserve as an ark of biodiversity from which species can colonize newly-restored habitats within their reach.
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Metadata last updated on 2025-02-01 22:00:23.0
