News stories about change in the countryside often make their point by presenting stark totals – 28,000km of hedgerow lost in the six years from 1979, followed by even more (42,000km) lost between 1984 and 1990, for instance. These and other significant statistics for countryside change over the last half century resulted from the work of the research ecologist Bob Bunce, who developed Britain’s Countryside Survey. He has died at the age of 81.
Before 1978, when the first Countryside Survey took place, we had little idea of the makeup of the countryside and how it was changing. Bob was then on the staff of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE, part of the government’s Natural Environment Research Council), and accepted the challenge of finding a way to measure countryside change at the national scale, at a time before the luxury of being able to observe whole countries from space made some aspects of change easier to record.
