King's College Cambridge wildflower meadow monitoring data: biodiversity, climate change and society

The biodiversity and climate crises are critical challenges of this century. Wildflower meadows in urban areas could provide important nature-based solutions, addressing the biodiversity and climate crises jointly, and benefitting society in the process. King’s College Cambridge (England, UK) established a wildflower meadow over a portion of its iconic Back Lawn in 2019, replacing a fine lawn first laid in 1772.
We used biodiversity surveys, Wilcoxon signed rank, and ANOVA models to compare species richness, abundance, and composition of plants, spiders, bugs, bats, and nematodes supported by the meadow, and remaining lawn, over three years. We estimated the climate change impact of meadow vs lawn from maintenance emissions, soil carbon sequestration, and reflectance effect. We surveyed members of the university to quantify the societal benefits of, and attitudes towards, increased meadow planting on the collegiate university estate.
In spite of its small size (0.36 ha), the meadow supp..., Study site
Meadow establishment
The meadow area covers about 40% of the original extent of the King’s College Back Lawn, which was first laid in 1772. The dimensions are 96 x 66 m lawn (0.63ha) and 96 x 37 m meadow (0.36 ha). A soil study commissioned before sowing showed both the topsoil (of 30 cm depth) and subsoil were strongly alkaline (pH 8.4) sandy loams. The topsoil had intermediate fertility (20-27 mg/l extractable phosphorus, 131-167 mg/l extractable potassium, 0.50-0.52% total nitrogen using Dumas method), whilst the subsoil had moderately high fertility (35-54 mg/l extractable phosphorus, 69-129 mg/l extractable potassium, 0.24-0.39% total nitrogen). Thus topsoil removal was not necessary, and seed was sown into glyphosate treated scarified topsoil at 6 g/m2 in October 2019. Three different seeds mixes sourced by Emorsgate were sown: the Great Lawn meadow mix, a perennial meadow species mix intended as the long-term flora of the meadow; a Cornfield Annual mix intended to pro..., ,