Biodiversity Updates 2022-2023

January 9, 2024

The Biodiversity, Sustainability and Ground and Gardens Teams have been hard at work to achieve some blooming good biodiversity outputs for 2022-2023. Abhishek Dixit, Biodiversity Project Officer at FX Plus, has reported a total of 1,152 wildflower plugs planted in 2023. In fact, we’ve planted a total of 1,572 plants since March 2022.

We also observed 5,145 square metres of grassland enhanced by wildflower seedling and turf planting. With 1,940 square metres of mixed evergreen and deciduous woodland enhanced by invasive plant removal and tree planting.

In addition to the daily contributions of our green fingered colleagues, some of this planting was also thanks to our weekly Campus Conservation Volunteering Sessions which are held every Wednesday lunchtime from 12-2:30pm, and last year an impressive 51 sessions were delivered for students, staff, and the general public. For full details about upcoming sessions visit our ‘Events on Campus‘ page.

 All these activities are already helping wildlife on campus, as seen through new wildlife monitoring events. The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme is one such example, whereby we contributed the recording of 545 individual butterflies from 14 different species.

In total, our Biodiversity Project Officer has led 17 Wildlife Walks, participated in 12 Outreach Events and engaged 225 participants through these biodiversity events.

To continue to build on this work, we have a number of wildlife monitoring events planned for 2024, such as the RSPB Big Bird Watch events which will be held on both our Penryn and Falmouth campuses this month (26 and 27 January 2024), and a BeeWalk, Bat surveys, bird monitoring programme, and potentially a freshwater quality survey for our streams and ponds. Keep a look out for these future events on the FX Plus website here.