David Gowing Digitising Somerford Mead Data

Using a special data curation grant from ECT, David Gowing and his team at the Open University have successfully digitised and curated over 30 years of vulnerable ecological monitoring data from the Somerford Mead experiment. We invited David to describe the experiment and the project to secure its data for access to all via NERC’s Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) at UKCEH Lancaster.

Somerford Mead is a restored floodplain meadow on the River Thames a few miles upstream of Oxford, forming part of the Oxford University Farm. It was restored more than thirty-five years ago, and we believe it to be the longest running restoration project for this habitat type in the UK. The restoration work and its subsequent monitoring were overseen by Dr Alison McDonald of the Plant Sciences Department at the University of Oxford. The site was formerly an arable field. It was spread with seed harvested from a neighbouring meadow (Oxhey or Oxey Mead) in 1986 and monitoring started in 1987. In 1989, a grazing experiment was instigated in which, following an annual hay cut each June, small paddocks within the Mead were either grazed by sheep, by cattle or left ungrazed. This management and the associated monitoring of the sward’s composition continued on an annual basis until 2014. Dr McDonald retired from the project in 2013 and UKCEH Wallingford took on the monitoring for the final year. I consider that the data set created has a unique place in guiding both our current restoration efforts and the long-term management of meadows. For that reason, it is crucial to keep the original data safe and available for re-analysis should the need arise.

The monitoring scheme sampled ten quadrats in each of the 9 plots (3 blocks x 3 treatments) producing a full list of plant species and a measure of their abundance. The original field sheets had been kept securely by Dr McDonald, who had analysed them and published her findings in the Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire. However, no electronic record of the complete dataset existed and so the Floodplain Meadows Partnership, with grant support from the ECT, undertook to digitise the data and to deposit the resultant files with the NERC Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) housed at UKCEH Lancaster. Dr Melanie Stone, well-known to ECT for her pioneering work on the RainDrop experiment, took up the challenge of transcribing all the data into digital format. The EIDC staff then assisted in transferring the data to a long-term, secure and accessible store. They made the process simple for the user by specifying a clear format for both the data files themselves and for their associated metadata, such that future researchers can not only access the data but also appreciate exactly how they were collected and processed. The dataset is now published and available to all (access the EIDC dataset).

The experimental grazing treatments ceased at Somerford in 2015, but the traditional annual hay cut with uniform aftermath grazing has continued thanks to the site’s current managers, FAI Farms Ltd. A Masters student project was conducted there in 2022 to investigate whether any effect of the experimental treatments could still be detected after seven years of uniform management. The Floodplain Meadows Partnership continues to observe the site and it plans to add further data to the EIDC dataset in the future.     

About the Author

David Gowing is Professor of Botany at the Open University and an ecohydrologist with a special interest in floodplain meadows. Since 2007, he has also been the director of the Floodplain Meadows Partnership, which aims to pool resources and knowledge amongst all those involved in the conservation of this rare and threatened habitat type. David also sits on the Steering Committee for the RainDrop long-term drought/rainfall experiment at Wytham, a short distance from the Somerford Mead experiment.