STAGE 08 / 10 — PROTECTING THE PLANTING · TWO OPTIONS

How do we stop the cattle eating the young plantlets?

The same herd that suppresses Rubus regrowth will browse a young Scalesia if nothing stops it. We are going to test two ways of stopping it, side by side, on the same ground. A is a physical cage: proven, and the arrangement already drawn in the sequence. B is an inner virtual exclusion zone around each regenerating group, with no hardware in the ground at all. Whichever keeps more plantlets alive is the one we adopt and build on — and making that decision on evidence, rather than assuming it, is what the trial is for.

Not operating · authorization in process · option B untested
A

Physical enclosure inside a virtual boundary

VIRTUAL BOUNDARYVIRTUAL BOUNDARYPHYSICAL EXCLUSION — MESH PANELONE VIRTUAL BOUNDARY · HARDWARE IN THE GROUND
PLAN VIEW THE HERD GRAZES THE CELL AND TURNS AT EVERY EDGE
WHAT IT IS
One virtual boundary holds the herd in the cell. Each planting group sits inside its own cattle-proof mesh enclosure.

KNOWN
Physical exclusion works. It is the version drawn in sequence panels 08 and 09.

COSTS
Hardware carried to every plot, posts driven into restoration ground, enclosures recovered by hand at stage 09, and a hard limit on how many groups can be protected at once.
TRIAL ROLE — the control. Whatever else is tested, this is the arrangement whose behaviour is already understood, and the one the permit application can describe without qualification.
B

Virtual exclusion inside a virtual boundary

OUTER VIRTUAL BOUNDARYOUTER VIRTUAL BOUNDARYDIVERTS ON AUDIO CUEINNER EXCLUSION ZONE — 10–15 m RADIUSBOUNDARY INSIDE BOUNDARY · NOTHING IN THE GROUND
PLAN VIEW THE HERD GRAZES THE CELL AND TURNS AT EVERY EDGE
WHAT IT IS
Boundary inside boundary. The outer virtual boundary holds the herd in the cell; a second, inner virtual boundary of 10–15 m radius sits around each regenerating group. The collar issues the audio cue at the inner edge and the animal diverts. Nothing physical enters the plot.

UNTESTED
This is trial design, not established practice.
WHAT THE TRIAL HAS TO SETTLE
1. Does the collar hold an animal out of a zone whose radius is close to the collar's own position error? A 10–15 m bubble is small relative to typical GPS scatter, and drift that pushes the boundary a few metres puts the herd inside it.
2. What happens on a missed cue — is there a physical fallback for the first cohort of plants, or is a lost group accepted?
3. Does exclusion-zone pressure concentrate grazing on the ground between bubbles and change the defoliation pattern?
4. How is release staged — does the bubble shrink as the group passes browse height, or lift in one step?
NOTHING ON THIS PAGE IS AN OBSERVATION. The 10–15 m radius is the figure carried in the concept diagram, not a tested value; both scenes are drawn to a 1 m scale derived from adult cattle stature; and the plan views are schematic — plot shape, planting-group spacing and herd number are illustrative. A staged answer is available and may be the honest one to put in the application: run A and B in adjacent cells in the same season, with B's first cohort given a physical fallback, and let the collar-accuracy data decide whether B scales.