Therefore, where suitable management exists, botanical diversity is expected to increase over time, with some plants emerging from the seed bank in response to favourable conditions, and others colonising from airborne or animal-carried seed.
Do the physical structures of solar farms encourage a greater botanical diversity when compared with equivalent undeveloped agricultural land?
7.1.12 Botanical diversity on solar farms may be influenced by the diversity of ecological conditions provided by the solar panels themselves. In several sites, greater broadleaved plant diversity was observed between the rows as compared to beneath the panels. This difference is likely to be due to the effects of shading and drying beneath the panels, where more extreme ecological conditions are likely to occur. It is likely that more ‘natural’ field conditions exist between rows, where shading is less and rainfall is not impeded by the panels. Therefore, in the more extreme conditions beneath the panels, one might expect only more specialist plants tolerant to these conditions to grow. This may be a focus of further analysis work of the current data, however, it was not under the remit of this study.
7.1.13 However, the reverse was also found at one site, where diversity of broadleaved plants was greater beneath the panels than between the rows. On this site (Site 9), the effects of regular cutting may have reduced the botanical diversity of the area between the rows (the area beneath the