Management
The reserve contains several types of habitats including reed beds, grazing marshes, wet woodland, fen orchid-rich meadows, and the River Yare. These are managed through traditional techniques, including reed-cutting, mowing, cattle grazing and scrub removal.
When purchased in 1976, it was in a state of being heavily overgrown. Since then considerable effects have been made to restoring it to the open fen landscape of the 19th Century. Initially, this involved breaking up vegetation with high pressure jets and pumping out mud and dto recreate the broad. On going restoration work presently is scrub and invasive plants removal and repair of disused ditches.
Reed bed and fen meadow management includes summer mowing and grazing, seasonal flooding, maintaining water levels, clearing rushes, grazing and mowing, and trampling with livestock to create boggy ground. Wet woodland includes protecting standing dead wood and keep water levels high from April to July.
The reserve contains the largest area of hay meadow in East Anglia that has remained untouched except for a late hay crop - a practice crucial to the maintenance of its plant diversity.
Read more about this topic: Strumpshaw Fen RSPB Reserve
Famous quotes containing the word management:
“The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The care of a house, the conduct of a home, the management of children, the instruction and government of servants, are as deserving of scientific treatment and scientific professors and lectureships as are the care of farms, the management of manure and crops, and the raising and care of stock.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)