Report from Mary Dean

Volunteers from all parts of the country are carrying out botanical fieldwork to record the plants present in our towns and countryside. We are in the later stages of recording plants for the years 2000 to 2019 for inclusion in the Atlas 2020 project organised by Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) http://bsbi.org/atlas-2020.

This project follows on from the BSBI’s successful millennium Atlas, ‘New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora’, edited by Preston, Pearman and Dines.

We record in the countryside and manmade environments, recording everything up to garden boundaries. We visit nature reserves, public parks and open spaces, coast, woods, towns and cities, using public footpaths, canal towpaths and roads to cover the different habitats.

It is great fun as you never know when you might find an unusual plant, or one that is uncommon in Lancashire - and you get plenty of fresh air!

In areas with a fair number of volunteers, such as Lancashire, we aim to visit every 1 x 1km square (monad) with public access, based upon the Ordnance Survey grid system. In addition to the fieldwork of individuals and couples, local botany groups organise meetings to record from particular areas.

Naturally some areas are better recorded than others and volunteers are currently trying to fill the gaps and add to the information for the less well recorded areas. Ormskirk is fairly well recorded, however close by there are places with few recent records, recent being post 2000. One of these under-recorded areas was Burscough, in particular the industrial estate (monad SD4211 on the OS
map), and my recent recording visit means it can now be crossed off the list of 'under-recorded'.