This area of grassland (to the right of the path from here down to Friends Bridge) received its last hay cut in August 2019 and has since been left unmanaged. Although rewilding is the current buzzword – hence our use of it on this sign – non-intervention on a small area of land does not fit stricter definitions of rewilding, so what is happening here is perhaps better described as ‘wilding’. In the campus habitats management plan it is described as a ‘Succession Area’, and it will indeed provide an ideal living laboratory site for Ecology students on campus to study habitat succession and other natural processes. Most of the small trees you see close to the path are poplars which have ‘suckered’ from the mature specimens on the other side. A study of spiders and beetles in the Whiteknights grasslands conducted in 2021 shows that this area is already starting to diverge in character from the other grasslands.
