Woodland Study

Quadrat Day.

All 3 schools on our site - infant, junior and secondary - joined forces to map 5 areas of our woodland.
Simon West, who works for the New Forest Commission, led the operation.

Before we could take the children, teachers had to take part in a training morning and learn how to measure the first quadrant and plot the positions of the major trees.

A few weeks later the children were taken down to the woods to complete the 4 other sites.

Secondary pupils worked alongside infants and juniors to measure out a 10-metre square and then plot the positions, diameter and name of each tree inside the quadrat. Each tree was labeled and the final maps can be seen on the Priestlands website.
It is intended to re visit each quadrat annually and take new measurements of each plotted tree, and locate any new saplings that have grown.
This information will be added to the original mappings and so an ongoing record of the growth of our woodland will be developed

Whilst in the woods our children took the opportunity to make bark rubbings and use a key to identify the tree they had come from.
We also identified some of the minibeasts found underneath rotting wood and made sketches of them.