Britain's rainforests are coming back it might actually seem odd to even consider that Britain has rainforests but it does we are a rainforest nation and I guess it kind of makes sense when you consider how much rain that we get and unlike warmer tropical rainforests these enchanting Woodlands are much cooler and deciduous the plants transform with the seasons but like tropical rainforests they are still incredibly wet and it creates these conditions for these amazing life forms to flourish right now I'm actually here in dartmore which is home to a few fragments of Upland Oak rainforest these remaining fragments give us an idea of what we've lost in Britain but I also think they show us what could still come back it really is these Upland environments where we can actually see this habitat come back and it has been but we'll get into more on that in just a minute and in order to try and understand exactly how we can return this habitat we'll be visiting another very special rainforest further west in the UK a place known as cabil which is home to a 3,000-year old rainforest upon the Rolling Hill of cornwall's bodman Moore where Merlin will be giving us a tour and he'll explain the significance of this special habitat how they're working to reconnect people create a new model for other Farms to follow and crucially how they're embarking to restore this habitat so I actually think that you don't have to work too hard in order to convince people that temperate rainforest is something to care about all you have to do is show it to them temperate rainforest you know especially these Upland Oak forests they are just amazing the way the branches twist and bend and they're just covered in mosses like lians and ferns I love filming it because you have to do a pretty bad job in order to make it not look epic and G rubs the author of Britain's lost rainforest I think he sums it up really well when he says that these these little life forms which cling to the branches in these forests these are our charismatic species these are the species which we need to cherish and we need to celebrate you know much like the Lions of Africa or tigers in India in Britain I think we don't look inwards enough and consider the beauty of our habitats and what makes these habitats even more notable is how few of them actually remain in the landscape I think until pretty recently these habitats have gone under under represented despite their beauty and how amazing they are they've kind of gone a little bit under the radar scattered isolated patches of this habitat make up 1% of the country but there's actually around 20% that is suitable for this habitat to thrive and this weather pattern can be found along the western side of Britain the Atlantic coast of the UK that's why we sometimes call temperate rainforest Atlantic Forest this Zone runs from Scotland down through Northern England Wales and into Cornwall and Devon and this I think is actually incredibly exciting to imagine that 1 of the entire land mass of the UK could be temperate rainforest could you imagine that so before we can understand how to bring back Britain's lost rainforests we need to kind of take a look at why they went in the first place and the short answer is is that we cut them down so it's actually been a hack job which has taken place over thousands of years we cleared forests like this for agriculture a very similar story that's now unfolding in the tropics in the Amazon in the tropical rainforests their pristine rainforest is being cleared for monoculture crops and to raise cattle and as recently as the 20th century in Britain we've cleared our temperate rainforests for non-native Conifer plantations in Scotland I visited this wonderful old oak tree just completely covered in a mass of lyans and mosses but it's just entirely surrounded by non-native conifers and with all this land juice change came the introduction of the sheep to Britain now the Sheep is a non-native herbivore it's got no place in our Landscapes and they will readily Munch up young tree saplings and along with other imbalances to our native herbivore such as red and Road deer and actually all of the other non-native deers that we have and gray squirrels it's made our Woodlands it's made our Landscapes essentially an all you can eat buffet and it means that forests like this they cannot regenerate they come up and they come down but the key thing is is there's always this new regeneration coming through when you look over dartmore or parts of Scotland and really anywhere in the UK it's a pretty common site to see absolutely no trees it's something which seems normal to me but also completely abnormal it's a hard thing to pin down but sadly this is our Baseline for how we accept the British landscape this is our idea of wild our idea of natural and actually here at wiman's wood ecologists have observed that it's expanding not only are the trees getting bigger but we're seeing more of them you know using Boulders as fixed reference points we're able to observe how this Forest is expanding and you know this is likely due to climate change and also less browsing from sheep but today wiman's wood is facing different challenges it's arguably one of Britain's most famous temperate rainforests you know it's really got quite hot in the media and you know I'm responsible for this I make videos about this so all I ask is that when you come to Woodlands like this habitats like this is that you just treat them with respect but I actually think that providing safe experiences of these habitats is key to their restoration because if we allow people to experience them people can connect with them we can connect with them and what better way to connect with them than through our feet so going Barefoot not only brings us closer to Nature and we know that there's a lot of Science and understanding on how that can benefit us it actually feels really good but you know what it's not always practical it's not always you know easy to do this and that's why recently I've been wearing a pair of Vivo Barefoot I've began the Journey of rewarding my feet you know whether or if we're walking running jumping or dancing I didn't realize just how good it feels to wear barefoot shoes These Boots I'm actually wearing now are designed for the forest ecosystem in mind it's part of a whole collection where they've created Footwear for different biomes and the upper is made of this beautiful soft wild leather and the sole is made of this Michelin plate which is like thin enough so you can still feel the world around you but you have the confidence to know that nothing is going to come through and Vivo and leave curious align so well because we're both trying to do the same thing connect people with nature except they're going down the route of doing it through our feet and this is a brilliant segue to introduce Merlin over at cabill who also had a pair of Vios on he had the same ones on we also had similar shirts on you know none of this was planned um I guess we just have a similar style come pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig right let's just feed you cuz you are look at this you are chucking up the soil already let's feed you here big pig pig pig pig there we go there we go at that the personal story that that Lizzie and I both had that really led us to this point was um I was in the military for about a decade and and did three tours in Afghanistan and in 2017 I started to suffer quite badly with with PTSD uh and at a similar time my wife and I were trying to start a family and she was having a number of miscarriages and finding that very damaging to her mental health and we both went through traditional clinical healing processes but we also found a lot of healing in this Valley the place where I'd grown up um without realizing how special it was and after going through that process firstly we wanted to create a business that would allow more people and bring more people into this space but we also wanted to see if we could find a model where rather than shrinking the Woodland and increasing the grassland this green tarmac we could increase the Woodland and perhaps find a way that we could still make a living from this um the traditional farming land but in a way that restored the Woodland so we then started to study the Woodland and initially we had the Doomsday records that showed that it's a thousand years old so we know from 1086 that this Woodland was extent even then and and 98% of our ancient Woodland in the UK has been cut down so that already puts in a very rare category we then did some um pet cor surveys with the Eden project and they were able to establish that this Forest is I mean they were very specific they said we can tell that it's at least 3,664 years old give will take 29 years which I love so we know we've got at least three and a half probably more thousand years of unending growth death Decay regrowth restoration happening within this Valley and it was at about that time four or five years ago that people started talking about Atlantic temperate rainforest as a habitat and we realized that what we have here is is a very rare and and quite I mean there's nothing pristine in the UK but as pristine as you can get example of rainforest in this Valley and at that point it became crazy to even consider reducing the Woodland to expand the Farmland it was about integrating the two together our initial project was a Thousand-Year project the charity that that that Lizzie and I founded which is a national charity the only charity in the UK dedicated to the restoration of Atlantic temperate rainforest that charity is um is trying to help people to think more like these guys and less like ourselves so humans are stuck in this 2 five 10 year time frame anything beyond 10 years and it becomes slightly relevant whereas an oak tree can live for a thousand years you know these are these are Millennial creatures that's they take 300 years to grow they can live for 4 years they take 300 years to die and rot back down into the soil and if we can start to force ourselves to think a little bit more like an oak tree and take a step back from our human perspective then nature restoration habitat restoration um and climate change none of it to me seems that scary anymore it might be scary in the short term but we need to think for future for the long term we're doing more and more samples with in the soil of the rainforest and the organic matter the mycelial content that we find Within These soils is just off the chart so whereas in and this is again it comes down to those human short time frames we we classify anything as ancient Woodland in the UK which has been around since 1600 now to an oak tree a 400y old Woodland is still very young it's a toddler um it needs to be thousands several of thousands of years old to really have that full integration and equilibrium that the trophic system can create over a given time deep time and here the mycelial connections are so dense between each tree that each tree and each plant isn't just connected once or twice over there's thousands of connections between root to melium to root borrowed in at the cellular level enabling the passage of not just water and sugar between every organism but also electrical signals warning signals memories knowledge which means that whereas in a younger Woodland that might be two or 300 years old that we as humans might think well that's still quite old it's um it's 100,000 trees growing out of a big patch of mud in an ancient rainforest like this it's 100,000 fingers all sticking up from one giant mushroom that we're walking over and that's the amazing thing and it and it it then manifests in so many ways so we see for example the way that the masting happens of the oak trees here so when the oak trees Mast uh when they create acorns in a younger Forest because they don't create acorns every year they do it every 3 to five years so in younger Woodland where there might not be such a connection between the trees one tree might do it one year one will do it another year one will do it the year after they'll spread it out throughout the season you'll have this constant peppering of uh of acorns in a forest like this with 4,000 years of connection between the trees even though each tree is only a couple hundred years old two between two and 400 years old they've still got that connection beneath the soil and that means that when they Mast every tree Mast together so every four years we have a one week period where every tree in this Forest it's like they're whispering to each other and they've said Ready Steady go and they drop a million acorns at once it's like walking over a thick bubble wrap it crunches and then the the year later we have the saplings coming through the tragedy we then have so here's a good example we had a m about 18 months ago and we've now got tens of thousands of little tiny Oak saplings like this and I always think it's amazing to consider that this sapling could still potentially be a living tree in the year 3024 but every sapling we have here will be eaten and will die which is I think the tragedy we have Within These forests that but again human short time frames we see a forest and we think it looks very healthy but over the space of several centuries this habitat is suffocating every sapling in here will be eaten in the next six months by a rabbit a gray squirrel or a deer uh and that's where and when it comes to rewilding as a conversation I think that the most important thing the rewilding movement needs to continue pushing on is reminding humans that we're a part of this system not a part from it and that reing is not about taking a beautiful area of nature removing humans fencing it off and letting it recover because that often won't happen we are in an island habitat we have brought in so many non-natives these Woods are constantly being encroached in by beach trees a non-native alopa tree that will take over from The Oaks and when that happens the biodiversity plummets the melal content of the soil plummets um the carbon sequestering impacts plummet these systems will restore when humans help to undo centuries of Mal practice which means that when it comes to rewilding or nature restoration we sit at the heart of it and without humans it doesn't work if we left this forest for a century and went well let's let's just step back and let it recover on its own every Oak that falls will be replaced by a beach whilst an oak can hold 600 species a beach might hold 30 or 40 you know it would just go off a cliff it's 8% of the potential and the deer so we have as I'm sure you I know you've done videos about this we have six deer species in the UK four of them are exotic we brought brought them in from overseas the fallow sea mjac and Chinese water deer they have no place within our ecosystems the two we have red and rad deer we have both of them in this Forest here and Road deer are Perfectly Natural they've evolved Within These systems but whereas the UK's carrying capacity or the mainland is 350,000 Road Deer the forestry commission stats um they currently think there might be as many as 1.4 wandering through our forests and to a road deer an oak sapling like that is like a FR roset just lying on the floor and they come through and they Hoover them up and until we start having serious conversations about the return of other apex predators and reclaiming our position as humans as an apex predator an ecosystem engineer and a hyper keystone species um these forests will will continue to slowly over the space of centuries decline the Thousand-Year trust is only just getting started embarking on a journey to restore temperate rainforest not just at cabill and Cornwall but with an eye to the rest of Britain with the idea that people are at the part of this movement I wanted to know how the trust is beginning to get to grips with this opportunity we took the view that you know we're research L charity we want to be data driven um that's how we want to do our stuff um and so we had to do a bit of a fundamental think around well what are our core strategic questions and then what are our approaches um to to kind of asking those and hopefully getting getting some progressively interesting answers as well because we don't we don't know an awful lot about this ecosystem um and whilst we want to jump in and get involved and make changes because pace is a relevant Factor you know we're very very cautious about doing a step forward and for back ultimately the goal is to reestablish 100,000 trees on the area to restore it and that doesn't mean we are going to plant 100,000 trees so quite a lot of this will hopefully be naturally regenerating but at the moment because we don't have any fences or anything to keep the deer out it would probably take more than a thousand years for those to actually naturally regenerate and I think I mean it's always there are so many different layers to this question between tree planting versus natural regeneration but I think for for me personally I also think there is something kind of Social and personal where a lot of people feel really overwhelmed with climate change and you think you can't really do anything it's so much bigger than you and then if you can bring in volunteers and you can actually plant the trees so you also feel you are part of this journey if if we really going to have a bit of a um a restoration attempt at this it has to come from a community perspective it has to be a change in how we see these Landscapes and whether we're successful with this planting or not it's critical that everyone's involved and at least feels to some degree like accountable do they identify with what we're doing here um and if they do or at least if more people are engaged than less then I think that's a really positive step almost kind of regardless of the impact because if we fail we fa we fail together and if we win we win together which just breeds better um better ideations for round two I think one of our fears is that um people see us as the group that wants to own everything and do everything you know like we don't we have no intention of doing that I think the only intention that we have is saying you know here's a here's a space where we're trying to show how you can do it and it might it might look differently for you you know because all the Landscapes are different like temperate rainforest and Scotland where there is the most of it looks very different to Cornish temper rainforest so there'll be variation but for I think what we're trying to say is holistically um we're trying to catalyze a movement rob you know that's that's really where we're at here and it's and it's not everywhere so we even had researchers come here before and um say well you know it's not relevant for every landscape and what are you going to do you're going to put temperate rain forest in in in you know East anger in the flat lands like no we're not going to do that like not at all like that would be a really big problem I think you know um but one thing we are going to do is definitely Target Upland areas in the natur natural kind of catchment zone for where the ecosystem could be thriving both enia and Harrison have a background in studying tropical rainforest and they're looking to draw from these experiences and knowledge and integrate them with this project you know lots of the research done on on tropical rainforest are done by Western universities and research groups and uh they'll go there and often have a local guide or a local assistant and the questions might not always be formed in collaboration with local communities sometimes they are it's fantastic but it's not always the case historically I guess less so um and we we've learned so much about tropical rainforest dur an inefficient manner but now as a brilliant time for them to come and teach us about how to how to do this work you know it's a wonderful time where we get to go to these communities who we've been you know looking at from different perspectives and saying hey you guys are actually you're leading this I'm we going to empower your knowledge and let's see if some of these lessons can be transported back to us because it's a two-way street it's not one way and you know we're desperate to to Foster that here and we think that's that's really really Innovative in terms of the flow of data but also the flow of innovation and Leadership too if we really to see temperate rainforest return we need to engage and bring together land owners the people who live and work in these potential rainforest zones they need to be incentivized they need to be shown that temperate rainforest can be integrated with or sometimes take the place of whatever it is that they're doing with the land and cabil and the Thousand-Year trust are on Route providing us with a blueprint to doing just that if you've enjoyed this video and you want to see more like it then please subscribe to leave curious it really helps the channel grow and it enables me to keep making these videos also do go and check out kabilla and all the good work that they're doing over there with their trust and you know what you may as well begin your journey of rewarding your feet take advantage of the discount and the 100 day trial and see what Vivo can offer you if you want to keep watching the channel check out the video that's on the screen now but in the meantime thank you leave curious
