Winterton Dunes - Lichen

Winterton dunes is a very large and complex dune system located on the east coast of Norfolk, between the villages of Winterton-on-Sea and Horsey. Winterton dunes has an extensive grey dunes covered in lichen. An important habitat that is fairly rare in England and as such has a lot of protections. The site is a national nature reserve and a site of special scientific interest. People love to walk along these dunes, especially with dogs. As people walk along these dunes, the ground below them is trampled, creating a system of paths. It looks like this trampling is causing the lichen to dissapear but looks can be decieving so we ran an experiment to collect evidence to prove or disprove this theory.

We ran four transects per path for eight paths using a 0.25m² quadrat. We determined the center of each path as the area that was the most visibly trampled and barren. Placing our first quadrat in the center, we’d then move our quadrat out to the side, away from the path. This meant that each transect would record data from 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1 meter(s) away from the path’s center. Once we’d completed a transect, we would walk three meters down the path and do our next transect until we had completed four transects for that path, at which point we’d move on to a new path.

For each quadrat, we recorded species richness, lichen cover % and total plant and lichen cover %. The latter two can be used to calculate total plant cover for each quadrat by taking away lichen cover % from total plant and lichen cover %. Our data supports the initial hypothesis of the paths causing a decrease in the amount of lichen on the dunes. To the right (below if on mobile or tablet) is a scatter graph of our data with a line of best fit, which shows that lichen cover % increases with distance from the center of the path. Also on the right is a table with the average lichen cover % for each distance; this also shows that lichen coverage increases with distance from the path center. The average lichen coverage decreases at 1 meter, as when some paths are particularly close to one another, the transect would go into that path, most commonly occurring at 1 meter.