Recently, VONNE’s Going Green Together Project Coordinator, Nathaniel Spain, has been getting involved in volunteering and attending talks across Tyne & Wear to learn more about local rewilding and nature-based solutions projects.
Wild Ouseburn
On Sunday 4th August, Wild Ouseburn held a botany information and survey session. The group met in the churchyard of St Ann’s in Battlefield, and began with a walk-and-talk with James Common, Senior Naturalist at the Natural History Society of Northumbria.
The species identified ranged from wild parsnips to willowherbs, yellow-wort to silverweed, bellflowers, vetch, and even an orchid hiding behind a gravestone.
Urban plants form a mix of native, introduced, and hybrid species. The session highlighted the startling biodiversity of urban areas, which can be greater than habitats considered more ‘natural’ like ancient woodland – so long as wild plants are allowed to grow and herbicides are not used. This is because of the variety of different habitats that pavements, walls, and disturbed earth can provide for plants that are otherwise only found in rare niches.
The session finished with a rapid survey of flowers in the churchyard. Because so few biodiversity surveys have been carried out in Ouseburn, every session like this throws up new discoveries. A survey of moths just before the wildflower event included multiple species recorded for the first time in that area.
You can find out more about Wild Ouseburn through Wild Intrigue’s website.
Wild Oysters
On the 6th August, Nathaniel volunteered at a monitoring session with the Wild Oysters project. This project, led locally by Groundwork North East & Cumbria and the Environment Agency, is testing methods for restoring historical oyster beds around the North East coast.
Oyster reefs can boost biodiversity, protect the coast from erosion, and even make the water cleaner – each oyster filters a bathtub’s worth of water every day! Oysters also used to be an important part of local diets as a cheap source of protein, but with 95% of local oysters having died off in the past hundred years, there’s a long way to go before they’re abundant enough to be a food source in our region.
At this session, the volunteers were checking oyster cages in Sunderland Marina. The number of living and dead oysters were counted, and the cages were removed and washed into nets to capture and count other species living around them, to measure their impact on biodiversity.
Oysters provide complex structures which can be a home to aquatic creatures, and the algae that forms around them provides a basis for the food chain. The group found shrimp, crabs, and even critically endangered European Eels living alongside the oysters.
The Wild Oysters project has about eight hundred oysters in Sunderland Marina, as well as several thousand out at sea. The project hopes to gather learning to be used in future, larger-scale oyster restoration projects.
Find out more about the Wild Oysters project through their website.