[Talk-GB] Last quarterly project for 2015

Dan S danstowell+osm at gmail.com
Mon Oct 5 09:48:23 UTC 2015


Hi all,

I might be able to help with Lea Valley - especially the central
London end of it. I've been mostly too busy for OSM this year, but
should try and get to some of the NRs...

Best
Dan


2015-10-05 10:43 GMT+01:00 SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com>:
> Hi Steve,
>
> The local hotspot around you is the Lea Valley. Various patches along the
> river & navigation will be nature reserves. It's a well known haunt of
> Bitterns in the Winter.
>
> Otherwise Middlesex is a bit thin. You can just make out LNRs & SSSIs on
> this map I made from OS Open Data designed to assist biological recording.
> They are shown as a diagonal or cross-hatch. There seem to be a couple up
> near Barnet, and some big ones missing N of Stanmore in Middlesex, and the
> Welsh Harp reservoir isn't shown as one.
>
> The usual sources for finding nature reserves and other places of wildlife
> interest which I use are;
>
> local Wildilife Trust. Usually the organisation with most reserves in a
> given county or group of counties. In your case these are London, Herts  &
> Essex Wildlife Trusts. It's not a bad idea to target getting all the WT
> reserves done.
> local Council. For Country Parks & LNRs.
> local Bird Club. Most bird club websites have quite good accounts of popular
> birding locations. Many of these will be nature reserves.
> local natural history books. Try the local studies section of a public
> library. For instance Herts WT have published very detailed volumes about
> Moths & Plants quite recently. These usually have a good account of
> significant sites which will be more likely than not nature reserves.
> local field club or natural history society. These don't exist everywhere,
> but where they do you are likely to find people extremely familiar with not
> just nature reserves but lots of detail of local topography.
> other conservation orgs: RSPB, Wildlife Trust, WWT, Buglife, Plant Life etc.
> Natural England (lists of LNRs, SSSIs)
>
> Jerry
>
>
> On 5 October 2015 at 09:56, Steve Chilton <S.L.Chilton at mdx.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Can you point me to a source for identifying NRs near me (L B of Enfield),
>> and I will try to get out to them and do a bit of boundary and path network
>> mapping where possible?
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>
>>
>> From: SK53 [mailto:sk53.osm at gmail.com]
>> Sent: 05 October 2015 09:29
>> To: Brian Prangle
>> Cc: Talk GB
>> Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] Last quarterly project for 2015
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm well in favour of mapping nature reserves, but they usually are quite
>> difficult to find actual boundaries.
>>
>> Nick Whitlegg and I walked through a couple of Woodland Trust areas on
>> Saturday and working out the extent of the area owned by the WT is
>> difficult. Similarly, over another non-OSM matter, I've been exchanging
>> emails with NT Eastern Office about Wicken Fen, but they have added so much
>> new land over the past few years that they dont have a ready to use map of
>> the reserve. Another one is the new RSPB reserve at Medmerry near Selsey,
>> which is the site of a massive managed retreat and new sea wall breach. This
>> was brought to my attention by Liz Scott (@birdmaps). Lastly, I haven't even
>> resolved the bounds of Attenborough NR: the staff now manage the area in
>> Derbyshire labelled Erewash Field on OSM. I don't know if it has been
>> formally incoriporated into the reserve, so the current mapping is a
>> sensible compromise (and yes Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust operate a
>> reserve in Derbyshire).
>>
>> There are Natural England datasets for National NRs, Local NRs and SSSIs.
>> I think these are under OGL these days, but like PRoW or Land Registry
>> inspire data, they may incorporate OS MasterMap data, and I have always
>> treated them as not fully open. Some local authorities have open data
>> showing boundaries of LNRs. Note that NR & SSSI boundaries are often not
>> coincident. NRs depend on either landowner agreement, or willingness to sell
>> land; SSSIs are based on conservation importance. And of course, some NRs
>> have geological SSSIs in their midst which are much smaller than the NR.
>>
>> The second thing which is really important for NRs is to get path networks
>> and access mapped out. Experience shows that even if one wants to start
>> mapping the things the NR is about, having the paths in is a necessary but
>> not sufficient condition for a decent map. Many NRs are very deficient from
>> this point of view (including the big ancient woodlands S of Coventry, such
>> as Wappenbury & Ryton, the last of which I visited at end of August.
>> Similarly both Wyre Forest & Werneth Low which I visited in September lack
>> many paths.
>>
>> There's a lot more to say about NRs, I have already started a draft for
>> the blog to do so inspired by looking at Medmerry.
>>
>> My feeling is that the most value can be added to OSM by improving details
>> of NRs local to individual mappers, and initially, at least path networks
>> (there are probably 10+ km of unmapped paths in Ryton Wood alone).
>>
>> One other plea, please don't map areas of grass as meadows unless you know
>> them to be meadows: Dudley wrote something about this in the past.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Jerry
>>
>>
>>
>> On 5 October 2015 at 08:39, Brian Prangle <bprangle at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone
>>
>> For the remainder of 2015 lets concentrate on Nature Reserves
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Brian
>>
>>
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