Just finished the fieldwork and breathing a sigh of relief after all the hectic rushing around the country surveying species rich meadows. The fields are mainly in the floodplains of the rivers Thames, Severn, and Derwent. We are looking at various aspects of these species rich communities which used to be a common sight but are now rare, for example what level of water and nutrients do they need/can they withstand. Floodplain meadows are of course subject to occasional flooding indeed they act as flood protection areas for cities such as Oxford, we know these high biodiversity plant communities can withstand a certain amount of winter flooding but what happens when the areas flood in summer when the plants are in full growth like happened in 2007?

The 1300 sample locations have to be surveyed over a short period when all the plants are up and flowering but before they are cut at the end of June. Besides the meadows that we have been recording annually for many years there were several ‘new’ floodplain areas that had not been looked at for 10 years and which proved to be a bit of a challenge. We wanted to record exactly the same 1x1 metre square areas (quadrats) that had been surveyed in the past so that we could see if there had been a change in species composition especially after the severe flooding and lack of hay cut that happened in 2007. The quadrats we record are not marked by anything – the areas are run over by hay cutting equipment and later grazed by animals so we can’t put in above ground sticks and filling each field full of buried metal to mark all 200 squares is not really desirable either. So how do we find them each year and how to rediscover the ones from 10 years ago?

Until this year we had been using theodolite type surveying equipment to accurately measure angles and distances from fixed points, these can position the quadrats to within a few mm if the fixed objects are still present and visible and we can find the ‘origin’ position of the survey. It’s a big ‘if’ when you consider that the origin position is usually a buried dipwell somewhere in the middle of thousands of square metres of waist high grass and that the landscape often changes quite considerably in 10 years. Fences are replaced, trees grow up and obscure reference points, the 10cmx10cm metal lids of the dipwells may be taken away so the metal detector might be of no help in finding them.

We are moving over to a gps based system, its not as accurate as the old system but can usually position the quadrats to within 5cm of where they should be which is fine and is usually significantly quicker as you don’t have to hunt for the fixed points and there is no delicate equipment to carefully set up on a heavy tripod. The gps also gives the locations in latitude/longitude or ordinance survey grid so researchers will be able to go back to those exact positions in future. There is still a bit of a downside to the new system, it may be lighter, quicker and can be one person operated but it does rely on the mobile phone system to get real time differential corrections of the gps signal – this is how it achieves a much better accuracy than a normal hand held gps. Some of our sites have rather poor and intermittent gprs mobile phone coverage which can be very frustrating as the accuracy can go from a couple of cm to a couple of metres and back again as you are walking along so we may even set up our own temporary base stations and use a radio link instead of using the mobile phone for these sites.

What are the results of all this effort by the botanical surveyors and of the chemical analysis of soil and hay, well you will have to wait until at least the autumn for all the data to be typed in and analysed. Just by eye some of the sites looked rather different to normal but this may have been more to do with the lack of a hay cut rather than the water from summer flood itself.

Botanical surveyors setting off to set up quadrats in a flooded meadow beside the Thames in 2008. Normally the meadows are dry at this time of year so it was interesting trying to identify species of grass under 30cm of river water at this site. The red box contains the ‘total station’ theodolite for comparison with gps at setting out quadrat locations.

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

One hundred and fifty years ago today the world first heard of natural selection at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London. The meeting was presented with extracts from (the now famous) Charles Darwin's writing - which were unpublished at the time - and an essay (by the less well known) Alfred Wallace.

Dr George Beccaloni of the Natural History Museum has written an extensive blog post on this milestone on The Beagle Project Blog which is well worth a read, especially as it highlights the often forgotten part that Alfred Wallace had in the story of Natural Selection.

You can also read a perspective on Darwin here on open2, an exploration of the phrase 'survival of the fittest' (and why so many people misunderstand it), and an extract from Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

The advent of the so called ‘Web 2.0’ and the explosion in social networking that the web sites and ‘mash ups of technology’ that underpin it have enabled has led to a resurgence of interest in electronic or digital democracy. This is the belief that first emerged in the United States in the 1970s that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to renew democracy. It was argued then, as now, that the interactivity of these new technologies – by which contemporary advocates of digital democracy mean the internet – will deliver new forms of political practice and participation, thereby reinvigorating and reinventing public debate and political accountability.

As with technological development generally much of the literature and debate on the internet and democracy has always been highly technologically determinist and optimistic: it treats technological development as historically inevitable (hence my use of ‘will’ not ‘can’, above), politically neutral, and fully accepts that any drawbacks and risks are outweighed by the benefits. For digital democracy specifically this translates into development, research and policy that is heavily biased towards the input side of democracy. That is, on technologies and their application and operation and not on what impact these have (if any) on outputs such as policy and decision making.

Allied to this entrenched determinism is a long standing tradition that can be traced back to the libertarian beliefs of the early pioneers of the internet: it is an inherently democratic medium. Its decentralised and devolved nature, and the weak forms of control to which it was subject for many years, certainly aided this view, thereby creating a utopian image of the internet as a separate socio technical system. Today we can witness this in much of the discussion of, and activity in, ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life, Habbo Hotel, and so on. However, the takeover of social networking sites and rapidly growing colonisation of virtual worlds by multi-national enterprises, allied with the widespread surveillance of cyberspace by government agencies must make even those who subscribe to the separate social system thesis question their position.

The potential for digital democracy has suffered the same fate, I believe. As the power and influence of governments and organisations committed to advancing consumerist forms of managed democracy has grown so the potential of the internet to act as a liberation technology has rapidly decreased. Instead we are witnessing the consolidation of a trend that was observable by 2000, when, working with colleagues from Denmark and Holland, we concluded our review of electronic democracy in Western Europe by reporting that:

“The scenario that emerges then, is of a “two-tier democracy”: a “big” democracy, concerned with policy and decision-making at a national and international level…And a “small” democracy where “ordinary” citizens try to make a difference in terms of the quality of everyday life. (Hoff, Horrocks and Tops 2000:187)

Since then the gulf between big and small democracy has grown as more and more people have become disengaged from the terrestrial world via their on-line personas, increasingly losing touch with, and interest in, real world politics and decision making and what they can do to influence and control these. To me, therefore, the main democratic problem of today seems to be how (or if) these two types of democracy can be reconnected.

Further reading

Democratic Governance and New Technology, edited by Ivan Horrocks, Jens Hoff, Pieter Tops, published by Routledge

About the author

Ivan Horrocks is a lecturer and member of the Technology Management Group at The Open University. He has written many publications about the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and government and politics.