Winterton beach field trip

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Winterton beach.
Sunset on the dunes.











One of the first field trips we went on this year was to Winterton beach in Winterton-on-sea which is a small village located on the east coast of Norfolk. There is an extensive dune system on the beach which is a National Nature Reserve of 109 ha. It is a fairly astonishing site as it has not so many ecological similarities with other Norfolk dunes and more with dune systems in the Baltic as it supports acidic plant communities. There are plenty of ranging habitats at the site including coastal sand dunes and freshwater pools. These habitats have resulted in a large amount of biodiversity being present in the area.

Sand dune succession had occurred here just like in any other area with sand dunes. On the embryo dunes the pioneer species was marrow grass which is a xerophyte meaning it needs very little water. It begins to stabilise the dunes so other species such as lyme grass and sea couch grass begin to grow. the next stage in dune succession is the grey dunes. This is when the conditions become slightly less harsh so more species can grow. At Winterton these species include red fescue and sea spurge. At this stage the percentage of ground covered by plants beings to increase. As you get further into the dunes and the conditions become less harsh more and more biodiversity builds up until a climax community is reached.
A quadrat set up to count number of species.

Randomly placing the quadats.
We used a random sample transect to see if biodiversity did increase as the dunes became more developed. We did this by throwing a quadrat every 10 meters and counted the number of species in the quadratic using a species ID card. We then repeated this for 220 meters and collected all the data along the way. Our results showed us that there was greatest biodiversity around half way between the start of the sand dunes and then end climax community. As a whole data set the number of species does increase from the first measurement next to the sea to the last 220 meters away but there are plenty of fluctuations along the way. The greatest biodiversity was found at 70 meters from the sea. If we collected more than one data set for each distance from the sea then maybe we would have got a more identifiable pattern because at the moment we do not know if any of these data points are anomalies and therefore altering the data.

The number of species compared to distance from sea.






















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