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Following time spent as a teacher of Biology, Judy was involved for 9 years in forensic environmental trace evidence surveys. The founder member of the New Marston Wildlife Group (now Friends of Milham Ford Nature Park), she is now an enthusiastic Oxford freelance ecologist and species recorder with a special interest in rare wetland plants (Sium latifolium is one of her ‘Flora Guardian’ species within the Oxfordshire Flora Group of the ANHSO), as well as flies and bees, although her interests also extend to other insects and fungi.
More about Judy Lye Valley BBOWT WILD OXFORD PROJECT
Reports prepared by Judy on Wild Oxford Project sites can be found under the heading 'Read the Wild Oxford project reports' near the bottom of this BBOWT website page. Judy's reports for 2018-2019 have been submitted but not yet posted on the BBOWT website. BBOWT event held at the University of Oxford's Museum of Natural History on 26 Sept 2018 to show progress over the last five years: click here Dipterists Forum - see FLIES ASTON ROWANT is under the 'MORE' menu tab. Bacterium threat to UK plants and trees: national appeal for help to spot 'cuckoo spit', caused by nymphs of froghoppers - see information here Almost 600 plant species lost from the wild in the last 250 years BBC News 11 May 2019 |
Judy was interviewed as part of a video filmed by Oxford City Council on volunteering - available here
(If there's no sound, check below video that sound is turned on.) The Autumn 2019 edition, No. 88, of the Bulletin of the Dipterists Forum includes Judy's updated article 'Flowers for Flies' (2019). Did you know that many flowers that are useful to pollinators such as bees and moths are of little use to flies? Most weak-armed, delicate-bodied, flies can't open up flowers like strong bees and a few largeish hoverflies can - see 'Time for a Change' on p. 8 of the article.
18 February 2020:
Judy was at Barracks Lane Meadow SLINC (to the NW of Cowley Marsh Park) with volunteers tackling the overgrowth of blackthorn - see Cowley Marsh Park page. 
Judy at Aston Rowant on 27 January 2020 examining what had dropped out on beating the canopies of junipers to see which invertebrates are using them in winter. The old junipers had a good number of juniper shield bugs. Photos taken by Judy of the bugs and of other volunteers working at Aston Rowant that day, as well as mosses and lichens she found there on 29 January 2020, can be seen here 
Members of the FHT's Oxfordshire Fens Project committee visiting one of the SSSI fen sites. An old artesian well can be seen in the foreground.
Four other privately-owned SSSI fens are included in the project, all currently partly classified as in ‘Unfavourable’ condition. At the request of the owners their location has not been divulged. Work on these four SSSIs is being funded by an EU Water Environment Grant* secured by the Freshwater Habitats Trust. *New page added by FHT to their website. Photo from p. 3 of the FHT's River Ock Catchment Partnership Winter 2019 Newsletter (the first edition of this newsletter), posted here by kind permission of the Freshwater Habitats Trust. Click on photo to see it full size. From left to right: Ellie Mayhew, Regional Project Officer for the FHT, Jeremy Biggs, the Trust's Director, David Morris, BSBI/Vice-County 23 Recorder, Rod d'Ayala, an ecologist skilled in wetland hydrology, Judy Webb The Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust's Wild Oxford Project
Judy has been involved in BBOWT's Wild Oxford project since it began in 2014. She is the ecology advisor and was contracted to prepare yearly surveys and reports for each of the first four sites involved - Lye Valley, Cherwell Valley, Rivermead Nature Park and Raleigh Park - until 2019. Now that the fundamental work to improve those sites has been completed, BBOWT will take over the monitoring, but Judy will be providing yearly advice on management plans. In addition, she joins in the volunteering work on each of those sites. 
Judy appears in a short video filmed in Rivermead Nature Park by BBOWT about their Wild Oxford Project in August 2019/ first seen with white hat, busy with orange-rimmed net and later explaining her involvement in the project. Andy Gunn, BBOWT’s Community Wildlife Manager (Oxfordshire) and Wild Oxford Project Officer, as well as Carl Whitehead, Parks Ranger and Coordinator of Volunteers for Oxford City Council, whom Judy works with volunteering on Wild Oxford sites and other parks and wildlife sites in Oxford, are among others who feature in it.
In the video Judy explains the two different aspects of her work for the Wild Oxford Project: contracted work to give ecological advice and provide yearly reports on the sites and the species they support, and secondly, doing voluntary work with various groups on the sites.The photo, taken from from the the second part of that video, which automatically plays after the first, shows Judy (white hat) talking to other volunteers at Rivermead Nature Park. |
- About Judy Webb
- Oxon Fens
- Oxford's Floodplain Meadows
- Flies
- Pollinators
- Rare species monitored
- Aston Rowant
- Cothill Pitt
- Cowley Marsh Park
- Dunstan Park
- Talks. Involvement with other wildlife sites.
- Submissions to Oxford City Council re Consultations and Planning Applications
- Northern Gateway Area Action Plan (Oxford)
- Northern Gateway Area Action Plan Proposed Submission Consultation
