Wild Atlantic Woods: how to recognise and maintain their cultural and conservation value

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. Our understanding of deciduous woodland dynamics in NW Europe is dominated by the paradigm of widespread human-induced clearance during the mid-Holocene, followed by selective management pressures in the historic period. Cultural impacts (grazing, farming, introduction of non-native species) are, overwhelmingly, assumed to lead to ecosystem deterioration, which undermines efforts to manage relict woods in a way that recognises and maintains both their cultural and conservation values. ‘Temperate rainforest’ in NW Scotland is fragmented, as is our understanding of its sensitivity to environmental change and the level of continuity from prehistoric woodland communities.

Land managers are making decisions around the future management plans for large areas in upland Scotland, with the aim of increasing the resilience of areas of conservation value and rural economies to climate change. These decisions may include increasing woodland cover with both native and non-native species, managing grazing intensity, removal of invasive species and the protection of cultural/heritage resources. Palaeoecological datasets can provide valuable insights to inform these decisions, in particular the response and resilience of woodland to climate perturbations and to different grazing pressures.

The project will use high resolution palaeoecological analyses which could include: (1) generating new high-resolution pollen records to improve data coverage in poorly researched areas of woodland, (2) the application of novel palaeoecological techniques such as insect remains (beetles) to determine changes in woodland health (3) quantitative analysis of herbivory using dung fungi to determine the variations in grazing intensity and (4) timeseries analyses of new and existing pollen sequences to assess community continuity and threshold responses through periods of rapid climate shift. Field sites will include existing remnant Atlantic woodland such as those in Argyll and Northwest Scotland. The methodology proposed offers the opportunity to generate novel palaeoecological data sets, with the application of a range of environmental and ecological proxies. The project will focus on periods of rapid climate change, with a focus on warmer and/or arid events (e.g. 8.2k, 4.2k, last 250 years) which also overlap with changing levels of human influence.

The relationship between climate change, catchment and vegetation can be complex. Therefore, the palaeoecological records will be supported by lithostratigraphic analyses to provide fine-scale evidence for the climatic induced changes in the wider catchment. The palaeoenvironmental records will be constrained using radiocarbon dating and tephrochronology to understand change on ecological timescales. Analytical techniques to understand woodland responses will include rarefaction (pollen richness), turnover and regime shift analysis. Partners in this project are National Trust for Scotland (NTS). A potential field site is at Inverewe, NW Scotland where there is a focus of ongoing conservation management, archaeological and historical research. By working with NTS to develop a broader research-practitioner exchange network for this woodland ecosystem, the project will provide the student with opportunities to discuss common interests as part of research design and to explore alternative presentation formats that connect past and future dynamics, such as scenario planning and map-based representation of land cover change. 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.