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The Floodplain Meadows Partnership is an innovative project focussing on research, management, promotion and restoration of these special meadows in England and Wales.
We will undertake long term monitoring to improve knowledge about plant community responses to environmental change. We will disseminate this information to all those involved in the conservation, management and restoration of floodplain meadows, and we will be running short courses, workshops and developing publications and literature that summarise the latest knowledge.
We would like to find out more about projects around the country that are restoring meadows and share experiences.
We would like to hear from you about your meadow experiences, your memories, your favourite sites and names that you remember and still use for flowers that you find in a meadow.
This project has the four following goals:
• To help establish best practise through use of case studies to promote restoration and re-creation schemes with the aim of increasing the extent of floodplain meadows by 200ha by 2015.
• To assist partners with the development and revision of management plans, as and when they come up for review, by drawing on relevant scientific data.
• To collaborate with appropriate partners to disseminate knowledge to managers and society as a whole.
• To advance scientific knowledge on meadows especially with regard to global change and its implications for nature conservation.
• To instigate an annual monitoring programme on the best remaining examples of floodplain meadows. This will to increase our knowledge and understanding of the ecosystem and improve our ability to conserve and recreate floodplain meadows. These habitats provide us with an early-warning system for threats to conservation and provide nationwide information on the response of ecosystems to the wider environment (e.g. atmospheric nitrogen deposition, altered rainfall distribution, increased flooding.)
• To facilitate a forum of stakeholders involved in the restoration of floodplain meadows, in order to develop guidance and share best practice.
• To promote consistency of long term monitoring schemes linked to environmental variables across existing floodplain meadows and restoration schemes, thereby establishing and promoting best practise.
• To develop a programme of short informative courses by 2009/10, using floodplain meadows as a focus to raise awareness of conservation issues amongst site managers and the wider community and to convene sessions at appropriate scientific meetings.
• To maintain a national database of survey data and interpret the data to address both scientific and management questions.
• To interpret new information on habitat management (e.g. concept of hydrological units, catchment sensitive farming initiative) in the context of floodplain meadow sites.
• To develop links with interested parties in other European countries that manage and study similar meadow systems.
• To publish research in a range of journals to reach a variety of readers.
