Microhabitats and Motorbikes
To Aston University’s New Optimist Lucy Bastin, derelict wasteland is far from an eyesore. It’s home. Not hers obviously. But often home to more biodiversity than any fertile farmland.
She knows this because as a senior lecturer in environmental science she researches “the spatial pattern and dispersal of plant species within the urban mosaic of remnant and emerging habitat fragments.”
Which means she knows a great deal about the importance of places like Selly Oak brownfield site, where she joined us with botanists Ian Trueman and Mike Poulton to tell us a bit about her work.
Lucy, Mike and Ian were quite hard to get to sit down. The sun was shining and there was an abundance of distracting flora and fauna in every direction. What we learned however was fascinating.
Urban brownfield sites, she told us, are surprisingly impressive in terms of biodiversity, especially in terms of insect species and their microhabitats. Why? Because the disturbance which makes these sites look so unmanicured creates short-lived habitats which have become rare in city surroundings.
Dirt Bikers Rule
Ian even told us that entomologists by all accounts have a soft spot for dirt bikers, for by keeping such sites open, churning up the soil and building their jumps they’re actually making for all sorts of insects a rather nice, if noisy, habitat.
Lucy’s research seems incredibly topical, with the Guardian last week launching a campaign, “Piece by Piece” to protect the UK’s biodiversity. Yet as several bloggers have noted that the planning issues surround brownfield and greenfield sites are far from simple.
And although wildlife habitat design, rather than the “accident” that brownfields provide, remains a compelling subject, changing Environmental Impact Assessment regulations make it no mean feat to support such habitats.
Perhaps, as Lucy writes in the New Optimists, brown roofs are the answer.
Meanwhile it seems important to remember that, as pointed outby this conservation blog:
Our wastelands, old industrial sites, rail embankments, roadside verges and gardens are… so beneficial to wildlife that they are bolstering and in some cases actually supporting the populations of species that would perhaps otherwise be danger of undergoing serious declines.
So take care what you tidy!
[...] been working with the publishers of a book called the New Optimists about how scientists see the future. On their blog, they have an interesting article about a brown [...]
[...] of the panelists was what other essay in the book struck a chord with them. Tim Grant spoke of Lucy Bastin, the urban ecologist who writes about the diversity of life on city brownfield sites, more than in [...]