The impact of sand extraction at Formby Point ... - Sefton Council

16
adjacent habitats for a time. However, sand-dune ecosystems are known to recover quite
quickly from major disturbances, a proportion of their characteristic biota being adapted
to unstable conditions, including rapid colonising ability. The fact that large areas of
undisturbed habitat remained between sand-quarries would have helped this process.
Natterjack Toads, for example, may well have thrived in the open sandy conditions which
followed sand extraction and which would have included abundant shallow pools in the
quarry floors.
There are circumstances in which large-scale disturbance to sand-dunes may be
positively beneficial to wildlife. Thus, most larger dune systems in Britain, including the
Sefton Coast, are over-stabilised due to lack of grazing, the introduction of non-native
trees and shrubs and a recent preoccupation of land-managers with preventing sand-blow
(Houston 1997). This encourages over-representation of mature successional stages with
consequent threat to the many species that require younger, more open, habitats. Thus, it
could be argued that sand-winning at Formby Point reversed, for a time, the trend
towards more stable conditions and provided opportunities for the plants and animals of
open dunes. However, the validity of this argument is reduced by the fact that, at the
time when most sand-winning took place, the dune vegetation was more open and sandy
than it has been in recent decades.
While the sand quarries represent younger landscapes than would have been the case,
they show plenty of evidence of having aged markedly since their creation. Thus, the
eastern section of the Lifeboat Road quarry has become heavily wooded over the past 30
to 40 years, and trees and shrubs, many of which are non-native, are still spreading. Tall
Creeping Willow, almost all of the coastal variety argentea, has overgrown the lowerlying
parts of Ravenmeols and Cabin Hill, while larger willows have invaded some of the
wetter basin sites. Several slacks, which were formed when excavation breached the
water-table, have become dryer, probably due to increased evapotranspiration and
accumulation of sediment. Not all these trends are wholly deleterious however. For
example “fixed dune with Creeping Willow”, which is so extensive on quarry floors, is
listed for conservation under Annex 1 of the EU Habitats Directive. The larger willows