Coordinated management of grazing at all sites

Management needs to be undertaken through appropriate burning or grazing regimes, with cattle and pony grazing especially valuable for breaking up dense bracken stands and helping to maintain open areas of bilberry and cow-wheat.

All Heath Fritillary sites (occupied or not) are now under a management agreement, either with English Nature or within the ESA/CSS. The populations surrounding Dunkery Beacon are all within the ESA boundary and all are entered on the scheme. The Dunkery, Yealscombe and Porlock Common populations are all on SSSIs. Nine of the 13 colonies in the Dunkery area are within the Dunkery and Horner Wood NNR (ENPA, 2001).

The Heath Fritillary sites are not in common ownership, and not subject to a common management system.  There is an urgent need to apply a coordinated composite plan that encompasses all sites.  The conservation of the Heath Fritillary needs to be considered from a broad perspective of the distribution of sheltered combes where metapopulation dynamics can be accomodated.  Management agreements between different owners are vital to apply a common plan to this group as a composite site, to allow populations to build up and naturally colonise new sites.

A conflict has been identified within the ESA, where a prime aim has been to improve heather quality by reducing grazing pressure. However this reduction appears to be leading to a severe decline in the quality of habitat in the combes for the Heath Fritillary and other threatened invertebrates.

To enable targeted management it is essential that information about the location and requirements of these threatened invertebrates are made known to the MAFF Project Officers responsible for adminstering the ESA scheme.

The need for management on sites to prevent succession to scrub and woodland means that there is a potential cost to the site owner. However, in recent years payments for positive management of sites have become available on Exmoor through the Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) in 1993 and  other schemes such as agreements with Exmoor National Park and English Nature. The ESA covers an area of 80,615ha and covers the whole of the Exmoor National Park (ADAS, 1997). The scheme involves different tiers of payment for farmers for a variety of environmental management prescriptions.