| Pike Whin Bog | |
| Site of Special Scientific Interest | |
| Country | England |
|---|---|
| Region | North East |
| District | Easington |
| Location | NZ415334 |
| - coordinates | 54°41′40″N1°21′25″W / 54.69444°N 1.35694°W Coordinates: 54°41′40″N1°21′25″W / 54.69444°N 1.35694°W |
| Area | 1.25 ha (3.09 acres) |
| Notification | 1984 |
| Management | Natural England |
| Area of Search | County Durham |
| Interest | Biological |
  Location of Pike Whin Bog SSSI, Co Durham | |
| Website: Map of site | |
Pike Whin Bog is a Site of Special Scientific Interest in the Easington district of east County Durham, England. It is situated just east of Hurworth Burn Reservoir, about 8 km west of Hartlepool.
A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Great Britain or an Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom and Isle of Man. SSSI/ASSIs are the basic building block of site-based nature conservation legislation and most other legal nature/geological conservation designations in the United Kingdom are based upon them, including national nature reserves, Ramsar sites, Special Protection Areas, and Special Areas of Conservation. The acronym "SSSI" is often pronounced "triple-S I".
County Durham is a county in North East England. The county town is Durham, a cathedral city. The largest settlement is Darlington, closely followed by Hartlepool and Stockton-on-Tees. It borders Tyne and Wear to the north east, Northumberland to the north, Cumbria to the west and North Yorkshire to the south. The county's historic boundaries stretch between the rivers Tyne and Tees, thus including places such as Gateshead, Jarrow, South Shields and Sunderland.
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to the west and Scotland to the north-northwest. The Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.
The bog lies in a natural depression, in which the water table is at or above ground level for most of the year, and is one of the few remaining wetlands in lowland Durham.
The water table is the upper surface of the zone of saturation. The zone of saturation is where the pores and fractures of the ground are saturated with water.
The majority of the site is sedge fen, in which common cotton-grass, Eriophorum angustifolium , is the dominant species. A variety of grassland types occur around the edges of the fen. [1]
The Cyperaceae are a family of graminoid (grass-like), monocotyledonous flowering plants known as sedges, which superficially resemble the closely related rushes and the more distantly related grasses. The family is large, with some 5,500 known species described in about 90 genera, the largest being the "true sedges" genus Carex with over 2,000 species. These species are widely distributed, with the centers of diversity for the group occurring in tropical Asia and tropical South America. While sedges may be found growing in almost all environments, many are associated with wetlands, or with poor soils. Ecological communities dominated by sedges are known as sedgelands.
A fen is one of the main types of wetland, the others being grassy marshes, forested swamps, and peaty bogs. Along with bogs, fens are a kind of mire. Fens are minerotrophic peatlands, usually fed by mineral-rich surface water or groundwater. They are characterised by their distinct water chemistry, which is pH neutral or alkaline, with relatively high dissolved mineral levels but few other plant nutrients. They are usually dominated by grasses and sedges, and typically have brown mosses in general including Scorpidium or Drepanocladus. Fens frequently have a high diversity of other plant species including carnivorous plants such as Pinguicula. They may also occur along large lakes and rivers where seasonal changes in water level maintain wet soils with few woody plants. The distribution of individual species of fen plants is often closely connected to water regimes and nutrient concentrations.
Eriophorum angustifolium, commonly known as common cottongrass or common cottonsedge, is a species of flowering plant in the sedge family Cyperaceae. Native to North America, North Asia, and Northern Europe, it grows on peat or acidic soils, in open wetland, heath or moorland. It begins to flower in April or May and, after fertilisation in early summer, the small, unremarkable brown and green flowers develop distinctive white bristle-like seed-heads that resemble tufts of cotton; combined with its ecological suitability to bog, these characteristics give rise to the plant's alternative name, bog cotton.
Because of the scarcity of wetlands in lowland Durham, species associated with this habitat also have a very localised distribution. Particularly noteworthy at Pike Whin Bog are greater spearwort, Ranunculus lingua , slender tufted sedge, Carex acuta , marsh stitchwort, Stellaria palustris , and bog bean, Menyanthes trifoliata . [1]
Carex acuta, the acute sedge, slender tufted-sedge, or slim sedge, can be found growing on the margins of rivers and lakes in the Palaearctic terrestrial ecoregions in beds of wet, alkaline or slightly acid depressions with mineral soil.
