We are delighted to hear that NBN Trust Honorary Member, John Newbould, has been awarded a British Empire Medal by King Charles III, in his birthday honours list for voluntary services to ecological surveying and data collection.
John is a retired Pharmacist, who qualified at the Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh in 1966. He worked in Rotherham most of his working life and in his spare time, volunteered with Rotherham Biological Records Centre. He joined the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union in 1978, served as Treasurer and Secretary retiring in 2011 was elected President 2012-13. Through, Bill Ely at Rotherham BRC he was introduced to the National Federation (now Forum) for Biological Recording and somehow found he had been elected to that Council, where he undertook similar duties. He was elected an Honorary Member of the NBN Trust at the AGM held at the Royal Society in November 2012 nominated by Paul Harding MBE and the late Trevor James BEM.
On retirement from full time pharmacy, he retired to Weymouth where he quickly started volunteering with Dorset Environmental Records Centre (DERC) and in particular doing ecological surveys for the National Trust’s West Dorset Countryside properties and also for the National Trust’s Bio-survey team based at Heelis; doing nature conservation assessments and habitat mapping both in Dorset and Yorkshire. The National Trust appointed him a Volunteer Specialist in 2016 and since then has been the volunteer team leader of a group of over 20 people, who gather each Tuesday to do surveys, with John producing a weekly illustrated Newsletter of the week’s activities.
He was volunteer team leader putting together one of the largest Nature Conservation Assessments in the National Trust’s portfolio – the Golden Cap Estate 2015-17. This estate has over 170 fields and has the largest area of unimproved neutral grassland in the National Trust’s England and Wales portfolio. The meadows at Westhay Farm are a particular gem with many thousands of green winged orchids in early May.
The Estate is internationally important for Waxcap fungi and their allies, with 26 species recorded since November 2016. The eight miles of soft rock cliffs between Eype Mouth and Lyme Regis are internationally important for insects.
Between Golden Cap and Eype, the cliffs holds the vast majority of the known world population of English centaury Centaurium tenuiflorum subsp. anglicum. The estate is also important for lichens, with a number of rare species identified by Bryan Edwards, the DERC Ecologist. This is a winter occupation for the team, with a particular favourite on hawthorn, blackthorn and increasingly on apple the Endangered golden-eye lichen Teloschistes chrysopthalmus.
For more information on volunteering in West and north Dorset email: westdorset@nationaltrust.org.uk