Events |
News |
Sites |
An Important Message From the Red River Rescuers (January 2025):
As you will all no doubt be aware, the habitat which adjoins the Great Wheal Seton Dragonfly Key Site along the Red River Valley is under huge threat from a proposed mixed development of housing and business units. This development on the Tolvaddon side of the river includes a County Wildlife Site, which like Great Wheal Seton, has in the past supported a colony of Small Red Damselfly.
Dates for your diary
Volunteer Dates for the season 2025/26
- Saturday 27th September
- Saturday 1st November at Bell Lake Marsh
- Saturday 29th November at Bell Lake Marsh
- Saturday 27th December at Bell Lake Marsh - Christmas Scrub Bash! See Events tab for more details
- Saturday 31st January at Great Wheal Seton
- More dates to follow...
Latest News
eDNA Sampling from the Red River Valley
Steve Jones spent an interesting couple of hours at Great Wheal Seton & Bell Lake Marsh with Eva Marquis & Dave Hudson, two researchers from Exeter University at Tremough.
Dave & Eva are looking at the biodiversity of historic mining sites and spoil tips across Cornwall. They are attempting to assess the biodiversity at such sites with the intention of both improving understanding of remediation and restoration processes and informing better practice in the future.
They have identified a number of different sites across the county, including a broad range of examples which cover different mining techniques, and age since mining ceased.
The sampling was very low impact and involved taking a number of small soil samples from each site, (less than 500g in total) of which a few grams are used for environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis and the remainder will be assessed for mineralogy and geochemistry to understand the interaction of biology and waste types.
By coincidence, some of you may have already caught the talk from Laura Weldon, of the eDNA Consultancy entitled "Applications of eDNA as a wildlife monitoring tool" during last Saturday's online British Dragonfly Society Annual meeting. For those who haven't, here's a link to the recording on YouTube:
Dave & Eva are looking at the biodiversity of historic mining sites and spoil tips across Cornwall. They are attempting to assess the biodiversity at such sites with the intention of both improving understanding of remediation and restoration processes and informing better practice in the future.
They have identified a number of different sites across the county, including a broad range of examples which cover different mining techniques, and age since mining ceased.
The sampling was very low impact and involved taking a number of small soil samples from each site, (less than 500g in total) of which a few grams are used for environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis and the remainder will be assessed for mineralogy and geochemistry to understand the interaction of biology and waste types.
By coincidence, some of you may have already caught the talk from Laura Weldon, of the eDNA Consultancy entitled "Applications of eDNA as a wildlife monitoring tool" during last Saturday's online British Dragonfly Society Annual meeting. For those who haven't, here's a link to the recording on YouTube:
Tolvaddon Proposed Development - Red River Rescuers Response
Photo taken by Steve Jones
Anyone who has visited our fantastic wetland at Great Wheal Seton during the last two years will be aware of the earth works being carried out on the opposite bank of the Red River. The Red River forms the boundary of the Red River Valley Local Nature Reserve at this point. To the south west is the reserve, to the northeast a patch of land that was for decades left largely undisturbed. What most of you won’t know is that some of that patch of land, like the neighbouring LNR, is a County Wildlife Site!
County Wildlife Sites were identified during the 1980s & 1990s on the basis of their high nature conservation value and have a degree of protection through national and local planning policy, meaning that they have to be taken into account in any planning proposals.
The earthworks on the patch of land opposite the LNR have been alarming, with the overwhelming destruction of habitat right up to the very edge of the river, which in the latter stages has included the partial infill of the wetland component of the County Wildlife Site. Like our reserve, this wetland has played host to the Nationally Scarce & declining Small Red Damselfly – Ceriagrion tenellum.
Over the two-year period that this has been going on, the Red River Rescuers have raised their concerns with Cornwall Council and the Environment Agency on a number of occasions, both verbally & in writing, and were told at one stage in 2023 that the landowner was dealing with a Japanese Knotweed problem. However, as far as we know, importing soil & rubble and moving it around a site, is not a recognised method of dealing with Japanese Knotweed.
County Wildlife Sites were identified during the 1980s & 1990s on the basis of their high nature conservation value and have a degree of protection through national and local planning policy, meaning that they have to be taken into account in any planning proposals.
The earthworks on the patch of land opposite the LNR have been alarming, with the overwhelming destruction of habitat right up to the very edge of the river, which in the latter stages has included the partial infill of the wetland component of the County Wildlife Site. Like our reserve, this wetland has played host to the Nationally Scarce & declining Small Red Damselfly – Ceriagrion tenellum.
Over the two-year period that this has been going on, the Red River Rescuers have raised their concerns with Cornwall Council and the Environment Agency on a number of occasions, both verbally & in writing, and were told at one stage in 2023 that the landowner was dealing with a Japanese Knotweed problem. However, as far as we know, importing soil & rubble and moving it around a site, is not a recognised method of dealing with Japanese Knotweed.
