Atlantic woodland health: long-term interactions between climate, ecology and management.

Project contact;
Dr Eileen Tisdall, Biological & Environmental Sciences, University of Stirling. Email: [Email Address Removed]

Background

Forest health is a growing, international concern, with most attention focused on climatic drivers and regions with large tracts of forest cover. By contrast, relatively little is known about how climate change influences forest resilience in landscapes where woodland cover is limited and its composition is strongly influenced by cultural legacies. This gap in knowledge is exacerbated by current evaluation methods, since ecological time-series studies are too short to understand lagged responses and potential disequilibrium between woodland responses, climate shifts and management legacies. These issues are particularly relevant in long-settled landscapes, like Europe. This project will focus on temperate Atlantic woodland communities in NW Scotland to explore how climate change – particularly warmer and abrupt shifts – and human impacts interact to influence woodland health, measured through palaeoecological evidence for diversity, continuity and capacity to recover from perturbations.

The project will use high resolution palaeoecological analyses which include: (1) generating new high-resolution pollen records to increase data coverage along a north-south gradient representing the latitudinal limits for oak, (2) quantitative analysis of herbivory using dung fungi to determine the variations in grazing intensity and (3) timeseries analyses of new and existing pollen sequences to assess community continuity and threshold responses through periods of rapid climate shift. New data will be produced from Inverewe, an estate managed by the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) which represents a key geographical gap in knowledge, and by resampling existing sites in this region to improve data resolution for critical time periods.

The PhD student will receive training in field techniques and lake sediment coring and will develop expertise in palaeoenvironmental reconstruction techniques, specifically pollen and timeseries analysis. The project also allows the student to develop skills in a range of lithostratigraphic and geochemical techniques, including XRF-ITRAX geochemical analysis and grain discrete electron microprobe analysis for tephra characterisation. The student will gain experience of archaeological approaches for investigating human/landscape interactions. The student will also work alongside the NTS to engage with the public through fieldwork collaboration and workshops. The NTS will provide a minimum 1 month residency at Inverewe during each summer as well as in the final year of the training. During these periods, the student will become the ‘researcher in residence’ at Inverewe.

Collaboration with the NTS will provide training opportunities and increased insight into cultural impacts on the woodlands. In return, collaboration with NTS staff will ensure that future environmental management is framed by an understanding of long-term cultural and climatic impacts on this landscape. This participatory approach will provide a blueprint for future collaborations and ensure that research outcomes are relevant to the research users, both informing and informed by land and heritage management issues.