What has happened to our wetland plants? - Geoffrey Hall, The Sowter Memorial Lecture - Leicester Lit and Phil Natural History Section

Geoffrey is the BSBI's vascular plant recorder for Leicestershire and Rutland (VC55). Starting in January 2015 he spent much of the next five years walking hundreds of miles over the whole of Leicestershire & Rutland with Steve Woodward and Russell Parry to get enough records into the BSBI's database to satisfy the requirements for the Atlas 2020 project. They visited many aquatic sites and Geoffrey was struck by the general state of them compared with sites that he knows in other areas of Britain. The amount of neglect, infilling, and the adverse effects of pollution were often astonishing, but some water bodies were well looked after. Although corrective action to reverse these problems is certainly possible, the task is not a simple one.

The Sowter Memorial Lecture is dedicated to Frederick Sowter, F.L.S. (1899-1972), one of our early members and an important botanist.

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