2020 County Report for Warwickshire

John Walton, Monika Walton

We held no field meetings this year, but a band of five of us visited 49 of our Wildlife Trust Reserves. In September we wrote a condition report for the new decade making  suggestions for improvements in management. This will hopefully help to increase their knowledge of the plants within their reserves. We had an excellent face-to-face meeting with the head and deputy of the reserves management team. The list of species lost during the last ten years is, not surprisingly, quite long. The Warwickshire Trust reserves are not well managed, with only a tenth of the trust employees involved in maintenance and management; they do not have a good botanist on their staff. We will be focusing on the remainder of the reserves in the new season.

We have published two Newsletters and delivered an update on recording for the year at our County Recorders Meeting which took place just before the lockdown.

Eleven new species were added to the county list in 2020, only one of these, Moenchia erecta, being native. This was found in short turf on a golf course closed during lockdown, where it had last been seen 121 years ago.