We are delighted to be seeing signs of spring and getting ready for our first full survey season with the Ice Age Ponds volunteers.

Volunteer Training

After a month of training sessions and online talks, our enthusiastic volunteers will start surveying new ice age ponds during the next month.

We are still holding practical volunteer training sessions to learn how to undertake our Ice Age Pond surveys.  These give volunteers a chance to practice completing the pond survey form and spend some time with our project ecologists looking at amphibians, invertebrates and pond plants.  To register your interest and get details for new training dates please contact Sarah King, one of our Ice Age Pond trainee assistants (s.king@herefordshirewt.co.uk).

If you missed our online training you can watch it at https://www.herefordshirewt.org/iceageponds/training-events-resources

Also available are some short talks by project staff:

  • Conserving Herefordshire’s Ice Age Ponds: Aspects of the Geology by Ian Fairchild
  • Identifying Aquatic Invertebrates
  • An Introduction to Pond Plants
  • Identifying Amphibians Training

Ice Age Pond water chemistry.

We are keen to learn more about the water chemistry of our ice age ponds and see how these vary between sites and over the course of a year.  To help us we are working with the University of Birmingham and University of Keele to evaluate water samples from 20 sites across our project area.

We have 4 wonderful volunteers who will be making repeat visits to these sites over the next 6 months to take samples ready for analysis at the university laboratories.  In preparation for this we held a training day at Sturts Nature Reserve.  We look forward to sharing our findings at the end of the project.

Our water sampling volunteers learning how to use water filtering kits

Find out more:

To keep up to date with our project, please follow us on instagram (@earth_heritage_trust @herefordshirewildlifetrust ) twitter (@buildingstones @HerefordshireWT) or visit our project blog: https://www.herefordshirewt.org/iceageponds/newsletters-blogs.