Natural England - East Dartmoor: data sets

East Dartmoor: data sets

Yarner Wood National Nature Reserves (NNR) has been a NNR since 1952. Since then the area has been used as an outdoor laboratory, where research has been undertaken into elements of woodland ecosystems and also more recently heathland ecosystem.

The datasets referred to below have been collected over time for a variety of reasons and uses. They will be of interest to a range of people including research students and volunteers .

We are looking for volunteers who would be willing to help us develop this data and present it in a more usable form. Some data needs more work done on it than others; we can suggest possible areas of study.

East Dartmoor data sets map

Data gathering locations map: (772kb)pdf document

Air quality

Air quality samples have been taken for over 20 years from the station on the heath. These are checked by laboratories and the results are available from the links below. Extracting the relevant data for Yarner Wood to make it more user friendly is a possible area for study. There has also been some work done on possible effects on the ecosystem, but there is scope for this to be done in more detail.

  • CSV data files for Yarner Wood monitoring site
    Automatic monitoring dataexternal link

  • Acid deposition dataexternal link (Please note this data is due to undergo an enhancement).
    A summary of the trends and actual data for a given year is supplied within the UK Acid Deposition Monitoring Network:Data Summary. See the 2007 reportexternal link.

Birds

Yarner Wood is famous for spring migrants and we have nest box records going back to the mid 1950s.  Research is being carried out on pied flycatchers in particular. We also hope to gain data on the non nest box breeding birds such as wood warblers.

Butterflies

The link below is to details of the Yarner Wood butterfly transect which has been undertaken since 1976. A dissertation was done in 2007 on ”The implications of global warming on butterfly abundance at Yarner Wood, Dartmoor, as determined by the responses to three weather variables over a period from 1976-2006”.

Moths

There has been a Rothampstead trap on site for 37 years. The location of the trap has been changed slightly three times.