Activities and Opportunities

Flora
Shotover Wildlife has a number of field botanists. These members form the foundation of plant recording at Shotover. In addition, many other people contribute their identification skills each year.

Opportunity

The ADOPT-A-SECTOR scheme

This is one of the best opportunities around for building field skills in plant identification! If you would like to practice or increase your plant ID skills in a practical and manageable way, why not adopt your own area or ‘sector’ of Shotover on which to focus? In this way you can enhance your field skills whilst making a real contribution towards helping the organisation build a comprehensive appreciation of Shotover's flora.

Each year we focus on a different part of Brasenose Wood or Shotover Hill, dividing a large area of habitat into smaller sectors. Each person chooses the size of sector they would like, and adopts it as their own for the year. You visit your sector to record the plants in your own time, as often as you like between March and September. Support Days are run throughout the season to help you confirm any plants you are not sure of. A grasses identification workshop is provided for Shotover Wildlife members each summer in the reserve.

In the autumn we combine everyone’s species list onto the SW database for a comprehensive survey of that year’s area. The results are fed back to the surveyors and interpreted for best conservation management of the reserve.

The Adopt-a-Sector scheme has been a huge success since its start in 1999, and has been of great benefit to many SW members. One member is now enjoying a career as a professional botanist, and has become a County Recorder for flora, having first got started with the Adopt-a-Sector scheme!

Contact us if you would like to join the Flora Team.

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