Stepping Stones was a landscape-scale nature conservation project in the Shropshire Hills. The project area covered over 200km2 within the Shropshire Hills AONB and included 2 major sites of conservation importance: Long Mynd SSSI and the Stiperstones NNR. The project aimed to connect wildlife habitats by strengthening existing habitat and creating stepping stones and corridors of habitat between and around the 2 aforementioned sites. Species Action Plans (SAPs) were produced by Natural England and the Stepping Stones Project for 12 species that rely on particular habitat types and one of the SAPs was for Upland Dragonflies.
The recent State of Dragonflies Report (Taylor et al, 2021) illustrated how a number of our upland dragonfly species are declining nationally. Black Darter and Golden-ringed Dragonfly formed the focus of the Stepping Stones SAP, chosen as they occupy different upland habitat types. The full SAP can be viewed by clicking on the document right, but essentially the first steps were to find out more about the current distribution of our upland species and the quality and location of upland pools and streams that we have. Then we would be better placed to decide where habitat creation, links and improvements would be most beneficial.
What did we do?
THANK YOU to all who volunteered to help by investigating upland areas or committing to the longterm monitoring of sites.
Your investigations, species recording and monitoring have already lead to finding upland species in new parts of the Stepping Stones project area. Habitat investigations have also lead to a number of recommendations that will be passed onto the National Trust and hopefully result in real tangible habitat improvements on the ground.
At the end of the 2024 field season I produced this summary report including updated distribution maps of the 2 species named in the SAP: Upland Dragonflies Project Update 2024
A further summary report on the 2025 field season can be found here: Upland Dragonflies Project Update 2025
What next?
Thank you to all who have contributed records and your valuable time over the last 2 years to assist our upland dragonflies. The Stepping Stones project has come to an end though a bid has been put forward for the Shropshire Hills Landscape Connections project. If successful this hopes to cover a much larger area than the Stepping Stones project and is hoping to improve habitats and build climate resilience- all very relevant to our upland dragonflies. The issues highlighted by the upland dragonflies Species Action Plan remain very relevant and the challenges presented by climate change remain very real. This has been underlined by Black Darter and Common Hawker being categorised as Near Threatened on the ‘soon to be published’ Odonata Red List for Great Britain. These 2 upland species are also now listed as Endangered on the European Odonata Red List along with Emerald Damselfly categorised as Near Threatened (De Knijf, G.,2024).
Sadly with the end of the Stepping Stones project I cannot continue to single handedly sustain the investigating aspect of the project. I am however really pleased we have set up the very valuable long-term monitoring which will continue and thanks to your investigations our knowledge of species and habitats in the project area has increased greatly along with establishing new landowner contacts. I am also confident that our reporting will lead to real habitat improvements on the ground. All species records and habitat information recorded during monad investigations remain extremely valuable and will feed into conservation efforts and potential future projects going forward.
It remains the case that each and every future species record is important and please do continue keeping an eye out for our upland species, record anything you see and enter the records on iRecord or simply send them to myself. I hope to report annually on our Shropshire upland species using your casual records and also the monitoring data.
THANK YOU!
References:
De Knijf, G., Billqvist, M., van Grunsven, R.H.A., Prunier, F., Vinko, D., Trottet, A., Bellotto, V., Clay, J. and Allen, D.J. (2024). Measuring the pulse of European biodiversity. European Red List of Dragonflies & Damselflies (Odonata). Brussels, Belgium: European Commission. 46 pp
Taylor, P., Smallshire, D., Parr, A.J., Brooks, S.J., Cham, S.A., Colver, E.F., Harvey, M., Hepper, D., Isaac, N.J.B., Logie, M.W., McFerran, D., McKenna, F., Nelson, B. & Roy, D.B.(2021) State of Dragonflies in Britain and Ireland 2021. British Dragonfly Society, Old Weston, Huntingdon