Video
Video showing the site and the sampling procedure
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Commentary
- Panorama of landscape, especially of surrounding hills - This is a typical garrigue landscape, in the Corbières maritime of Southern France. We are on a high plateau, part of a substantial limestone massif that reaches 450m.
- Pic du Pied du Poul - On exposed rocky outcrops, we can find plants adapted to very dry conditions, a phrygana- like community of thorny tussocks.
- Phrygana - In sheltered and flatter areas, where soil can accumulate, a garrigue or maquis can develop
- Pan to valley - This is Le Plat de la Lause , an upland plateau about 5km from the coast
- Close up of survey area - This area has been chosen because it is flat and has a uniform vegetation cover - a grassland with abundant thyme, a garrigue typical of the Mediterranean Basin.
- Close up of survey area - panning to bushy areas - This is abandoned sheep grazing land, slowly reverting to a maquis of scrub, as bushes of juniper, pistachio and kermes oak gradually encroach. In some places, the grassland is also interrupted by fractured outcrops of limestone.
- Close up of grassland and soil - Where there is a shallow soil, a rough grassland community develops. Amongst these grasses there is a surprising diversity of flowering plants. It is the species richness of this habitat we surveyed.
- Quadrats - Beginning at the centre of the grassland area, away from rocky outcrops and bushes, a quadrat was laid on the surface and the number of different plant species within the quadrat recorded. The quadrat is one quarter of a square metre. We recorded the species found in each quadrat. Samples or descriptions were taken for those specimens we could not identify on site.
- Rotating quadrat - The quadrat is then rotated to the left and the process repeated. In this exercise, we simply count the new species found in each quadrat. So we are observing how s, species number, increases with sample area.
- Further quadrat work - We were not recording the abundance of the different species. Our sampling ended when we began to encounter different habitats - bushes or rocky outcrops. In all we took 50 quadrats, a total area of 12.5 square metres.
- Panorama - Le Plat de la Lause is relatively isolated, but further plateaux with similar plant communities can be found elsewhere on the hillside, within a kilometre or so of this site.
