Small-scale habitat diversity

• The dry grassland at Abbey Farm is in either flat or undulating landscape with gradients up to 1:10. However, at a smaller scale, the fields are smooth with very few irregularities from the even soil surface they had as arable land
• This leaves wildlife exposed to the elements and offers little diversity in small-scale topography and climate
• We therefore created a small area with a much more undulating micro-topography. It has steep slopes facing in various directions
• Moving earth to create the undulations has exposed some of the underlying chalk so has increased the diversity of soil conditions, though only on a very small scale
• At Abbey Farm old mineral workings also create variation in topography. The dry grasslands include one old chalk pit and three marl pits

Other points:

Spreading hay:
Another method of seeding a new grassland site is to spread seed-bearing hay collected from a species-rich grassland site. A possible benefit of this method is that it might introduce spores from grassland fungi which play an important part in the ecosystem