#4 Field Gentian by Claire Bending
Meet Claire Bending, a freelance Farm Conservation Advisor and wildflower guide based in North Yorkshire!
Claire is a freelance Farm Conservation Advisor based in North Yorkshire, mainly advising on grant schemes such as Countryside Stewardship. She also does some habitat survey work, and works as a guide for Yorkshire Coast Nature where she leads wildflower walks. She has a special interest in native plants and enjoys studying botany in her spare time. You can contact her via email at: claire@moorsweb.co.uk, and she can also be found on Instagram and Facebook under @a_journey_with_plants.
Claire’s chosen species is the Field Gentian Gentianella campestris. Field Gentian is a small but very beautiful plant of low nutrient grasslands, and is found on a wide range of habitats including sand dunes, lowland dry acid grassland and upland calcareous grassland. It is on the England Red List as endangered and has suffered large declines in the past 75 years due to habitat loss through agricultural improvement, overgrazing, and undergrazing. It is a poor competitor which is quickly shaded out and requires open or lightly disturbed ground, so cannot survive well on heavily sheep grazed swards which tend to be dense with little visible soil. It is very similar in appearance to the more common Autumn Gentian (Gentianella amerella), which seems to cope better with sub optimal conditions. You can find out more about Field Gentian on the NBN atlas.
Claire first became acquainted with the Field Gentian in 2016 when she began volunteering for the Species Recovery Trust after attending a couple of their plant identification courses. Many of their volunteers were based in the south, so Claire volunteered to help fill the gap in the north. Her task was to search for Field Gentian on sites where it had been previously recorded to help build up a picture of how the plant was faring.
Field Gentian.
Consequently, over the past five years she’s spent many happy hours checking sites in the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines, which are its last upland strongholds in England (sadly it has been lost from the North York Moors). The task drew her in much deeper, though, and she began to ask herself questions to which we didn’t have the answers yet - why is it surviving on some sites but not others? What can we do to help reverse the decline on these upland sites? Who else can we involve to help?
This led her on a fascinating journey into the world of recording and species conservation. Claire comes from an agricultural background and although she has worked in habitat conservation for many years, it has always been at a much broader level; she wasn’t aware of the importance of species recording and the hours that many individuals and groups put into logging records. She has also met many interesting people on her biological recording journey, from incredibly talented botanists to farmers passionate about wildlife!
“Why is it surviving on some sites but not others? What can we do to help reverse the decline on these upland sites? Who else can we involve to help?”
What makes Field Gentian especially interesting is that it acts as an indicator species and it is quick to be lost from the sward if conditions aren’t right. In the uplands, there is a strong correlation between sites with cattle grazing and those with stable populations of Field Gentian. Whereas sheep go along nipping off the choicest parts of the plant and only eat coarser vegetation when forced, cattle are not selective grazers and go for quantity rather than quality, tearing off chunks of grass with their tongues. Cattle hooves also press into the ground and make furrows on slopes, which provides open ground and germination niches for seeds. Many studies have been done to show the importance of the correct balance of livestock grazing in the uplands and their recommendations echo the ideal requirements for Field Gentian.
Field Gentian in situ, alongside grazing cattle.
Getting the balance right between cattle and sheep numbers and grazing intensity also produces benefits for numerous other species, including many other flowering plants, invertebrates and ground nesting birds. It can also help control invasive species such as Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) and Purple moor-grass (Molinia caerulea).
As we enter a new era of farm policy, there is much discussion over what is going to happen in the uplands, including our two iconic upland landscapes in Yorkshire - the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. Some of the dialogues are the extremes; that farmers will be forced to intensify or that the uplands should be left entirely to nature. The outcome is likely to be somewhere in between, but Claire hopes that land managers will be supported to adopt or continue cattle or mixed grazing systems in ecologically sustainable numbers, which will help secure the future of Field Gentian, and many other species in the uplands.
Monitoring
As part of Claire’s role in monitoring Field Gentian, she is in touch with County Recorders and Local Environmental Records Centres in order to glean new records, as well as using the BSBI database. She also submits records for other Field Gentian volunteers. Records are an incredibly important part of species monitoring, enabling both the discovery of new, previously unrecorded sites and also to plot how the population is faring. If you have Field Gentian records you would like to pass on to Claire, a brief description of the site is useful, such as sward height and presence of grazing animals, which helps build a picture up of the conditions for the plant.
Acknowledgements and further information
NEYEDC would like to thank Claire for her time and expertise in helping to create this blog. If you’d be interested in contributing a piece for the series, contact Lucy at lucy.baldwin@neyedc.co.uk. To find out more about biological recording, see the Naturalists page on our website.