Island Habitats

The Island’s woodlands are of three main types:

• lowland mixed deciduous woodland

• wet woodland

• wood-pasture and parkland

The most important of these are the designated Ancient Woodlands, sites at least 400 years old. These are now considered ‘Irreplaceable Habitat’ in national and local planning strategy.

The farmed landscape covers over 70% of the Island’s land surface, a vast mosaic of different habitat types which can be of enormous importance for biodiversity and nature conservation. Hedgerows and farm woodlands, arable headlands and unimproved pasture, ponds and other farm wetlands, and even farm buildings themselves; all have been, and continue to be, a part of the changing relationship between food production and the natural world.

The north coast of the Island, from Seaview to Freshwater, was created when the Solent river flooded 7000 years ago to form the narrow and sheltered sea channel it is today. Its muddy, sandy intertidal, with scattered saltmarshes and seagrass meadows, supports internationally important numbers of overwintering waders and wildfowl (most famously the Brent Goose), terns diving for sand eels in the summer, and a huge array of marine invertebrate life, visiting seals and of course, seahorses.

Maritime cliffs on the Isle of Wight are dramatic landscape features with rare wildlife and significant geological exposures rich in fossils. They are dynamic based refreshed by frequent cliff falls and landslides and the pattern of warm bare ground, flushes and springlines, and patchy floristically diverse vegetation is exactly the mix required by some of our most iconic species, such as the Glanville Fritillary.

Chalk forms the backbone of the Island, extending from the famous sea stacks of the Needles in the west to the thirty-metre cliffs at Culver in the east. The highest range of chalk hills occurs as an outlier at the southern tip of the Island. Chalk downland is one of the rarest habitats in Europe, and the Island is custodian therefore of an internationally significant natural resource.

The Isle of Wight's largest remaining heathlands are at Ventnor Downs SSSI and Headon Hill, both expertly managed by the National Trust. Such sites were once much common, but have declined by over 80% since 1900., lost mainly to agriculture and forestry. Fragments of lowland heath remain scattered across the greensand landscape of the southern Island including working industrial locations such as St. George’s Down.

The Island’s three main rivers (Medina, Eastern and Western Yar) incorporate a wide variety of floodplain and catchment wetlands including some of the most fragile habitats known here, for example the tiny Bohemia Bog. The RSPB manages one of the largest wetland complexes on the Island at Brading Marshes, helping to recover species such as Marsh Harrier and Bittern. The transition from freshwater to saline in the north coast estuaries creates some of the richest natural environments in the UK, for example along the Medina estuary, Kings Quay, Thorness Marsh, Newtown National Nature Reserve and Yarmouth Harbour,.