The Wild-flower Project'. The conservation of endangered plants of arable fields.

Abstract

The wildlife of arable farmland has suffered considerable impoverishment in recent years, previously portrayed in Pesticide Outlook (Sotherton, 1990), and many of the plants that once were common associates of arable crops now occur much less frequently. A survey by the Botanical Society of the British Isles revealed that some species such as the lamb's succory. Amoseris minima. and thorow-wax, Bupleurum rotundifolium, had become extinct, while a number of others were becoming increasingly rare (Smith, 1986) (Table 1). At the same time species such as barren brome, Bromus sterilis and cleavers, Galium aparine, have increased, and now pose problems to farmers as great, if not greater than those of the past.
During the last 50 years, agriculture has undergone a technological revolution. Among other changes, herbicides have largely replaced traditional methods of weed control, the amounts of nitrogen applied to crops have greatly increased, new high-yielding cereal varieties have been developed, and crop rotations have changed radically. Changes such as these may have been responsible for changes in the composition of arable weed communities, but little is known about the ecology of the less common weed species in relation to farming practices.
The Wild Flower Project described here was set up to discover which factors had been responsible for the decline of rare species, and to propose scientifically based guidelines for their conservation within the context of arable farming. It was funded by the British Agrochemicals Association (BAA), and arose as a result of the Game Conservancy's work on Conservation Headlands aimed to persuade farmers reducing pesticide inputs on cereal field headlands for the benefit to stocks of wild gamebirds (Sotherton, 1990).