Features of National Nature Reserves

The diversity and wealth of wildlife, geology and cultural heritage on an NNR can be bewildering. So on each site, CCW identifies a limited number of special ‘features’ which have the highest conservation priority. This enables the Reserve Manager to effectively target practical work and monitoring.

Acid woodland at Coed Camlyn
       NNR, Gwynedd. _^© CCW

An NNR feature can be:

• A special habitat, such as Wet Woodland or Saltmarsh;
• A rare or characteristic species such as Golden plover or Juniper;
•  An assemblage of related plants or animals occurring together, for example, a Lichen Assemblage;
•  A geological or geomorphological feature;
• An archaeological feature, such as a Scheduled Ancient Monument.

Biodiversity and Earth science features are selected on the following basis:

• They are notified SSSI features (national importance);
• They are designated SAC or SPA features (European importance);
• They are other features of more local importance.

Analysis of features on NNRs

 Cliff ledge vegetation at Cwm
Idwal NNR, Snowdonia. _^© CCW

Overall, there are 252 different features represented in the NNR series, as shown in the table below.

The average NNR has 8 features (3 habitat features and 5 species features including assemblages). However, there is considerable variation between sites: Morfa Dyffryn has the most features with 31 (3 habitats and 28 species), while Coed Gorswen has only one habitat feature.

The following table shows the total number of features on NNRs (some features appear on a number of sites).