2022 County Report for South Hampshire

Martin Rand

BSBI and Hampshire Flora Group members recorded across the vice-county; 28,000 records were added to the database in 2022, 15,000 of which are from 2022. Group meetings that I led included recording for various purposes on the unenclosed New Forest and on private estate land within the Forest National Park. Group and personal trips also entailed extensive recording in the Itchen Valley from Winchester to Southampton, and calcareous spring-fed mires in the south-west of the vice-county.

I have participated in monitoring and controlling invasive non-native species on the New Forest (led by the county Wildlife Trust) and in the chalk-stream Test and Itchen catchments (led by Wessex Rivers Trust).

I ran a series of online workshops on identification of native and established alien evergreen broadleaves, followed by two field trips; also some informal trips for smaller groups of people to help them in learning families such as Cyperaceae.

Tony Mundell (vc12) and I have encouraged local botanists to participate in the LORE project, but this has not proven very appealing and can involve a lot of car travel for little result. We have asked people to focus on records in their immediate area. We are both eager to encourage more people to undertake detailed recording of threatened plant populations along the lines of the TPP, and we shall be running a workshop on this in early spring. In 2022 I made a start on re-recording Juniper sites, and this will continue (along with other taxa) in 2023.