A busy day on the moors

Sat, 22 May 2010 21:38:00 GMT

I got a phone call from Fiona yesterday asking me if I'd help with some research work being done on Black Hill by the University of Manchester on behalf of Moors For The Future (MFTF). Beth is doing the research and she's using a spectrometer to measure the light reflected from different types of vegetation over the course of the year. She's doing this so that subsequent aerial surveys can be analysed using the information. Areas of different vegetation can be identified on the aerial survey by looking for areas with the same absorption characteristics as found on the ground survey. The spectrometer is a ASD FieldSpec Pro supplied by NERC, one of the UK's research bodies. It allegedly portable - well, perhaps if you have a donkey it is, because as well as the spectrometer there are four lead-acid batteries, a laptop and a number of other bits and pieces. to be carried, so myself and David went out to help Beth - and poor David got the biggest lump to lug across the moor :-)

The readings can only be taken when there's no cloud obscuring the sun, hence Beth's heavenward gaze. Each plot has to have four readings taken, one on a white reference tile and three of the vegetation, from different positions to get an average reading. You can see the reference tile and the sensing head in the pictures above. There's a bundle of fibre optics that takes the light from the sensing head into the spectroscope on David's back, where the light is analysed and the results fed into the laptop that Beth is carrying. I had the difficult job of carrying a clipboard and writing stuff down :-)

A couple of hundred meters away from us there was another group of people who were also working on the MFTF project. The moors in the Dark Peak are an internationally important habitat, Blanket Bog. The peat was formed originally by Sphagnum Moss, but over the last hundred or so years, environmental degradation caused in part by the Industrial Revolution has taken its toll and much of the Sphagnum has disappeared, and there has been widespread erosion of the peat. MFTF have been re-vegetating the moors with heather, but Sphagnum is one of the really important species to re-establish because it is responsible for generating the peat in the first place, and locking up CO2 as a result. MFTF have contracted Micropropagation Services to prepare Sphagnum pellets so that they can be spread across the moor to effectively "inoculate" the ground surface with new Sphagnum.

The pellets are going to be spread from helicopter using an adapted agricultural sprayer, they were testing out the system and working out the snags in preparation for spreading the pellets on a wide scale. It took three years to get to the current stage, so there's an immense amount of effort going into this environmental programme. There are more details of the project on the Moors For The Future website.

After heading back from Heyden Head to Holme Moss summit, David noticed what appeared to be smoke drifting across the Bleaklow plateau. We are in a period of high fire risk at the moment due to the recent dry weather, and we've had catastrophic fires on Bleaklow in the past, so David and I had to bail out and leave Beth on her own so that we could go check out the smoke. We drove round the other side of the Bleaklow plateau and up onto Snake Summit expecting to see smoke, but there was nothing visible. We headed off rapidly down the Pennine Way to Alport Low where we could get a clear view of where the smoke had apparently being coming from, but there was nothing to be seen from there either - we passed Terry on the way with a group he was out with, and he also hadn't seen anything. I managed to get hold of Mike on the radio, he was on Kinder and had seen the smoke as well, but by the time we got to Alport Low there was nothing to be seen. Most puzzling - the three of us had quite clearly seen smoke from Holme Moss, all I can think if was that it was a small accidental burn that someone had put out quickly.

We then headed back to Snake Summit where we met up with Peter and Bob, then headed back round to the north side of the plateau again to put up "high fire risk" signs at Crowden and Arnfield - kinda ironic really - before heading back to the briefing centre and then home.

Airborne muckspreader

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 10:12:20 GMT

A couple of weeks ago the Moors For the Future folks started up the heather brash spreading operations that I've helped out with before. The aim is to spread a thin layer of chopped up heather (brash) over the bare peat as part of the process of getting it to regenerate. In the past the heather has been airlifted by helicopter onto the moors and then spread by hand. This is a very time and labour intensive process, and it is quite difficult to get an even layer. This year they are using a different technique (and a different helicopter company). Instead of the heather being lifted on site and then spread it is loaded into what I can only descrive as an aerial muckspreader which is then flown under the helicopter.

Here you can see it on the back of the truck - there are a pair of the spreaders, whilst one is being filled the other is being flown over to the spreading area. The bottom of the spreader is a conveyor belt that moves the heather towards the back of the contraption. The two vertical shafts with the disks and tines on them rotate towards the gap in the centre and fling the heather out of the back. The whole thing is powered by a small petrol motor underneath the hopper.

The lift site was right at the summit of Holme Moss, next to the transmitter tower. Being a peat bog means that even though the ground looked frozen it was actually very soft underneath - as they found out when they tried to drive the truck over to the stockpile of brash bags!

Needless to say a cooperative farmer and a large tractor were required to hoik the truck out of the hole it had dug for itself and move it over to the bags.

The helicopter they were using was a Squirrel. They'd taken all the seats out to keep the weight down - each spreader weighs about 1/4 tonne and holds up to 6 cubic metres of brash, so they needed all the umph they could get.

Unfortunately this meant we had to walk the 2.5km onto the moor, and boy was it cold. The spreading area was directly around the trig point on Black Hill - anyone who knows the area will understand just how bleak it is, and it was pretty windy too, which made it feel all the colder. The mast you can see in the background is the Holme Moss transmitter - at one point this mast provided TV coverage for most of the North West of the UK.

Once on site two people stood either end of the swathe they wanted the helicopter to cover and the pilot flew over them, turning the spreader on at the appropriate moment. It took about 30 seconds to dispense the 6 cubic meters of heather. The area on the right of the photo has already been covered, and the area on the left is not yet treated. Depending on the height, each run covered a swathe about 5 - 8m wide and perhaps 100-150m long. This was at the start of the day and the pilot was coming in relatively high, by the end of the day he was coming over us at about 2 - 3m above head height.

Here's a view of the contraption in action - you can see the stream of heather being flung out by the counter-rotating spreader shafts at the back of the hopper. The aerofoils above and to the side of the spreader shafts are to keep the whole thing stable as it's being flown under the helicopter.

And here's the net effect when you are stood underneath acting as a human marker flag. And yes it does itch when you get a load of heather down your neck, although the helmet and the goggles keep most of it off of your face :-) I was initially a little skeptical about the likely efficacy of this technique, but it was really very impressive. It gave a much more even coverage than hand spreading and is obviously far faster. The only problem was that the heather bags had been standing for some time, and the combination of them being stacked on top of each other, compressed, soaked in rain and then frozen meant that a lot of the brash was in solid lumps that jammed the spreader. However on subsequent days they got a machine up to re-shred the heather to get the lumps out and solved that problem.

As with the spreading done last year this is still very much an experimental technique, it will be interesting to see how effective it has been over the next couple of years.

Alan's Ramblings - black hill tag

A busy day on the moors

Airborne muckspreader