Ecology on the Olympic Park

Kim - Project Ecologist for Olympic Park: Hi! My name is Kim, I'm the Project Ecologist for the Olympic Park,and I'm going to show you a few items around the site, I spend a lot of my time going out and about looking after the Park - so come along with me.

OK this is one of the rivers in the Olympic Park site, we've done a number of species translocations from the waterways. They were taken to the waterworks nature reserve where again, we've created artificial ponds for these species.

We've cleaned up the waterways, there have been invasive species such as Japanese knot weeds , floating penny-wart, so we've actually been treating the waterways and remediating the areas to make it a more clean and pleasant environment.

We're in the North Park and this will be the warm up zone in the Olympics, we're standing in front of a retained tree which is called a London Plane. The trees have been on site for potentially up to a hundred years, and it's important that we maintain as many habitats and trees as possible, where feasible, and where the project allows.

We're at one of the nurseries that we've planted on site, and this contains material from cuttings from species that may well have had to of been lost throughout the site such as crack Willow, white Willow, and then these species can then be replanted as part of the landscaping works.

So all the hard work we've been doing over the last few years - I know the next few years will benefit all the generations to come and all communities that live around here.