Restoring the Caledonian Forest in Scotland. Alan Watson Featherstone. SERA Conference 2016

one of the inspirations for my work was discovering the work of the bradley sisters many many years ago when I first heard about restoration in Australia and the idea of working from areas where the ecosystem is closest to its intact stage from areas of strength is one of the key principles I've incorporated into the work of trees for life so the work I'm involved in is restoring the Caledonian forest in the highlands of Scotland and that's the native forest that used to cover most of the northern part of the country but one and a half million hectares at its peak about 4,000 years ago now we've got just a tiny percentage of that left characterised by the Scots pine the most widely distributed conifer in the world but the conifer forests of pine forests in Scotland is unique and different to anywhere else and it's also home to a range of other tree species and lots of wildlife and it gets its name from the Romans actually who called Scotland Caledonia meaning wooded heights and friend who knows Scotland today you know that there's very few trees left on the high ground so why do we need to restore well this picture here showing a desolate landscape with just a stump sticking out of it I think sums it up but before going into Scotland I want to talk a little bit about globally - because it's not just in Scotland that restoration has to take place not just in Australia either it's all over the planet and this picture of the Earth from space taken by the Apollo astronauts in 1968 widely used everywhere because it shows the outline of the African continent so it's recognisable most pictures of the planet from space show just cloud but here we can see the landmass and I think there's a deeper purpose why that is used and that is that the prominent feature in this photograph is the deserts the brown areas the areas that have become desertified through human activities so this is actually for me a picture of a wounded world it's a planet whose capacity support life has been seriously diminished starting over 2,000 years ago when the top of the photograph North Africa was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire and there were forests there full of creatures like elephants which Hannibal if you know your Roman history your Latin history Hannibal from Carthage attacked Rome with elephants there's no elephants in Tunisia today where Carthage was sited so we've got a wounded world then and it's not just Scotland that's lost its forests forests are in retreat all over the planet and when I started trees for life I thought Scotland was a worst-case scenario with less than 3% of as forests left but as I've traveled and learned more discovered many other areas in a similar situation the Redwoods of California the tallest trees in the world 4% left the famous Cedars of Lebanon from known from biblical days less than 2% of those left and then when we get to Australasia we find the big scrub in northern New South Wales tiny proportion of that left the Kauri forests in New Zealand less than 1% dry tropical forests in Costa Rica 2% it goes on and on so it's a global phenomenon and most conservation work today damage limitation stop the destruction is no longer adequate we need a major programme of restoration everywhere to revive and revitalize our fragmented ecosystems so Scotland then has the rather dubious distinction of having been in the forefront of ecosystem destruction it's been going on for several thousand years not a new phenomenon and many other parts of the world now are experiencing the same thing condensed in time here's a photograph showing the northern edge of the Amazon basin in southern Venezuela Gallery forest burned and a comparison photograph from Scotland showing a standing dead Scots pine you know desolation otherwise treeless landscape and if we come to New Zealand we find the same thing where the Kauri forests some of the largest and most long-lived trees on the planet been reduced to a tiny fraction of their original extent and the landscape is left as desolate grassland eroding with the occasional stump in its midst just like what we've got in Scotland and the new lands New Zealand being one of them New Guinea New Caledonia in the same region here new lands but they're all experiencing the same old story of uncontrolled ecosystem destruction and deforestation we need a truly new story for these places and for everywhere else and that new story is one that humans have never attempted to do until very recently in the last 30 40 years or so and that new story is how do we revive degraded landscapes how do we revitalize and bring them back to life restore biodiversity the human history on the planet is one of destroying ecosystems and people and civilization moving on somewhere else and repeating the same process so in Scotland we've lost most of our large mammals everything from the bear to the moose the Lynx the wolf the wild boar they've all been exterminated in the last 2,000 years or so and of course we find the same thing now happening globally scientists estimate we're losing something like a hundred and fifty species a day most of them invertebrates in tropical rainforests have never been recorded or named but some of the more large animals we do know have become extinct fairly recently here in New Zealand the Moors were lost after the arrival of the Maori about five hundred years ago or so the thylacine or tasmanian tiger one of the most notorious extinctions in the world occurring in Tasmania in the early 20th century and more recently we've had things like the pig foody Bandicoot in Australia the South Island pio pio in New Zealand going extinct and just in the past decade it's not absolutely confirmed yet but widely recognised to be true that the the body the Yangtze River Dolphin one of the freshwater dolphin species in the world has gone extinct as well so this is the tip of the iceberg but it indicates the loss that's taking place in Scotland then returning back to my native country what's happened is with this tremendous loss of biological diversity and then human pressures are preventing it's natural recovery because I think like many people who recognize that ecological restoration is a natural process the earth has Mendes ability to heal her own wounds and we see this when volcanoes erupt are those other large-scale dramatic effects life colonizes the bare earth and there are things recover in Scotland were preventing that from happening and the Anne scape has become equivalent to a writer an outdoor museum we go to museums to see dead relics of the past preserved items of life that used to be on the world and Scotland is like an outdoor museum now you can go and you find these exposed stumps in the peat of our vanished forests it's like going to a tree Cemetery or a forest graveyard so landscape of great pain so we've reduced it to this bare minimum and it's then become paralyzed we prevent the natural ecological processes of recovery from taking place an ecosystem that was perhaps 25 meters in height has been reduced to something that's maybe 5 centimeters tall and it's being held there at a level of minimal biological productivity that's what we've inherited from the past and everywhere we look in the Highlands of Scotland we can see the evidence of that this is the upper Afric River utterly treeless and the riparian trees that used to hold the soil in place are gone and in their absence large blocks of peat are getting washed downstream you can see them in the left-hand photograph here and the right-hand photograph you see the blocks stranded on a gravel bar and in the background the ruins of an old Croft and people used to live in these landscapes but in Scotland we had a notorious event in the mid 18th century called the Highland Clearances where wealthy landowners discovered it was easier and more economical to have sheep on the land than people so that people were evicted their crops were burned their houses were destroyed and they were forced off the land some went to the slums of Glasgow our biggest city some went to Nova Scotia some came to New Zealand and Australia and proceeded to destroy ecosystems here but the important thing from Scottish point of view is that the connection between people and the land was broken just like it was broken with the native North Americans with the Aboriginal people in Australia here in New Zealand so the people who lived on the land were forced off the land and the connection with nature was severed and that's really important we'll come back to that a bit later so in the highlands Emma got this highly degraded condition most of the forest is gone many species have been reduced to tiny proportions of original numbers particularly Moodle independent ones like squirrels and wood ants to name a couple other species have been lost completely all the big mammals are gone and then human pressures are preventing its recovery and those pressures are keeping large numbers of herbivores on the land deer which have adapted to their woodland animal have adapted to a treeless landscape sheep sheep outnumber people in Scotland it's not quite as Extreme as New Zealand but in Scotland we've got six million sheep and 5.3 million people Muir burn the practice of burning Heather to create conditions for grouse moors because that's an economic activity particularly for the wealthy and that burns any attempted regeneration of trees made some water logging of the soils and then ongoing nutrient loss we've already lost most of our biological well through deforestation and extermination of animals and the herbivores that are there consume whatever nutrients they can find from the soil and then their carcasses are exported that are sent off to market both sheep and deer and nothing is ever put back now one deer one sheep might not make a lot of difference but when we talk about millions of sheep and hundreds of thousands of deer for 200 years that's a huge drain on an already depleted nutrient base so the main issue then is that this imbalance between large herbivores and vegetation is preventing recovery ten thousand years ago there were no trees in Scotland because the whole country was covered in ice during the last ice age and when the temperature warmed up the ice retreated and trees recolonized insects birds and eventually people came the whole ecosystem restored itself naturally it would happen today if we weren't preventing it and that's by keeping too many deer and sheep on the land now deer the red deer in particular has as a woodland animal it's been forced to adapt to it Sheila's landscape and in doing so is reduced in body sizes about two-thirds the size it should be and more and more deer and living on the land they're fed artificially they've got no predators their numbers of more than doubled in 40 years and of course they for every piece of woodland they can because there's more to eat there there's shelter in the winter so they've literally been eating their own habitat to death for 200 years this imbalance has prevented the establishment of any new trees the old trees still produce seeds that seeds germinate they grow a few centimetres in height and then they get eaten and we've now got a 200 year age gap in our forest structure and we've got away with that for two centuries because the existing trees were still growing now those existing trees are all at the end of their lifespans they're dying of old age and there's no new ones germinating to take their place it's what I call the geriatric forest it's like going to an old people's home venerable old beings at the end of their long lives dying and no new life coming to take their place that's what we've inherited so these pictures here show the deer a Scots pine seedling over grazed in the middle and the dying forests the standing dead trees that we call snags and if they die of old age they die standing and the wood has a lot of resin in it so it preserves and persists for a long time the snags can stay dead standing for decades even it's not just Scots pine that son gets eaten no it's all trees but when we remove the grazing pressure we see a major process of recovery getting underway these are two photographs here where all that's been done is deer numbers have been drastically reduced by intensive culling and on the Left we see lots of lots of pine seedlings germinating and growing successfully from the old trees in the background and on the other photograph it's mostly a birch root because that's the existing seat supply there comes from mature birch trees so it's very simple actually if we can reduce the grazing pressure if there's a seed source nearby the forest begins to recover all by itself it's not rocket science inspired by that I've developed the work of trees for life and for me there's three main elements for successful ecological restoration in a Scottish context and I believe they apply elsewhere as well the first is that we have to get healthy vegetation communities re-established and that's because they are the foundation for all other life the vegetation absorbs the sun's energy and converts into organic material which can then be eaten by herbivores which supply fruit for the carnivores and so forth if you don't have healthy vegetation you can't support anything else so that's the first thing second element is getting the essential ecological processes which are absent at the moment reinstated so those are things like natural succession predator-prey dynamics nutrient cycling natural disturbance and so forth all of those fulfill a vital role in a healthy ecosystem and in Scotland none of them are occurring we've got the static museum piece landscape and then the third element is a reintroduction of missing species and that's a particular issue in Scotland because we're part of Britain which is an island and species that have been extirpated from the British Isles cannot physically recolonize by themselves they've got to be consciously and deliberately brought in another part of the world that's not so much an issue in mainland Europe for instance top predators like the wolf have been spreading particularly since the collapse of communism the barrier fence that used to separate East and West Germany came down at the end of the Cold War and wolfs have spread westwards they reached Holland last year but they can't reach Scotland because of the island effect so we've got to bring them back those are the three elements then that underpin our work now I first became aware of the plight of the Caledonian forest about 30 years ago in the 1980s and I spent time out in Glen Afric one of the best remnants of the old woodland and I was touched by the beauty of the place but I also saw that it was dying and I kept getting this feeling somebody needs to do something about this because if no action is taken in another 10 20 years all these old trees will be gone why isn't somebody doing anything about it and after 2 or 3 years of rest or maybe that somebody is me I can see the issue I've have the passion let's do something about it so in 1986 I made a commitment at a big environmental conference I organized to launch a project to restore the Caledonian forest and I think what's interesting looking back now is at the time I had no knowledge background or training in ecology or biology I had no access to land I had no resources I had no funds on a physical level I had nothing to help me achieve that goal but I had the most important thing I had the passion and the inspiration and by then I had enough experience to know that if I follow my passion and it is really the calling of Spirit in my life I will attract the support and the resources and the people that I need and that's been the history of it since then so in 1986 I began a conscious process of educating myself going out meeting people and countering landowners finding where could work be done how could I get funding and so forth and it took three years for practical work to get underway a long preparation time but it's a bit like a tree when a seed germinates the main work initially is growing its roots underground and it's a while before you actually begin to see you know the chute coming up so there was a lot of work establishing the roots of my organization before any tangible physical signs of it came but in 1990 I'd raised enough money to put up a fence in partnership with Forestry Commission the government the government Forest agency in Scotland who owned some of the best forest remnants but had no money to do anything I'd raised enough money by then but had no land so we came together as rather unlikely partners and we funded the fencing of 50 hectares 125 acres on the edge of a pine wood remnant on their land and a study done by a student before the fence were not sure there were a hundred thousand pine seedlings already there self sown from the remaining old trees average age ten years old an average height eight and a half centimeters 95 percent of them had been browsed by deer so we knew if we could put a fence up and keep the deer out and we would get forest recovery that's all we do and these two photographs here show some of the results since then the one on the Left shows me is a rather younger man taken in 1992 two years after the fence went up and I'm standing next to a little pine seedlings and and it was growing on top of a hunk so it was a bit more visible than the others and I started photographing and I photograph it every two years since then and the photograph on the right shows the same tree earlier this year and after 26 years of protection and it's now well over 30 feet tall it's been coning producing seed of its own for about ten years accelerating the process of recovery that's the edge of the forest there they edge of the fence you can see but I think even more dramatic is this next set of images which is the same area but in the heart of it so the fence is not visible because it's in this the center of the area and there were three of these standing dead Pines these pine snags when the fence went up in 1990 the photograph was taken bit before that and you can see there there's no new life around at all but some old living trees in the distance and the forest was really receding they're a bit like my hairline has been receding in the past 30 years as well and the photograph on the right you can see the snags are still there they've virtually unchanged in 26 years now since the fence went up but look at all the young trees that have grown up around them a whole new generation of pines and they've grown up not because we planted them but because the seats were already there and with the deer excluded they could come back by themselves so this is a very very powerful symbol on the left the dying forest and the right the regenerated revitalized young forest coming to take its place we've been able to turn the tide of forest loss in that instance natural regeneration is the best way of achieving forest recovery that nature do most of the work but that only applies in a Scottish context at least if we've got a seed source nearby all trees and seeds generally don't get dispersed very far 50 100 metres so in much of the highlands there's no trees for kilometres and kilometres so we've been planting trees as well started in 1991 and we plant trees in a way that seeks to mimic the natural distribution of the forest so we look for the right soil conditions to match each tree species we look for evidence where the trees have been before and the that photograph here shows a good example of that our very first tree planting week in 1991 we signed an old pine stump a volunteer there holding up a pine ceiling by his tree planting bag about to plant it we know Pines can grow there there was one there probably a hundred years ago a good place to put one bag but if you look at that photograph also you'll see very clearly how desolate the landscape is there and all the vegetation is suppressed there's heather in that photograph which should gross me about waist-high but at that stage it was suppressed to about 4 or 5 centimeters in height by grazing pressure so when we planted the trees we had to fence the area as well otherwise the deer would eat all the tree seedlings so the following two photographs show the same scene over the decades since then and not only has the tree that that volunteer planted grown successfully but the heather has grown as well and covered the roots of that stump that was previously exposed so we see that protecting an area and stimulating the process of recovery actually creates a chain reaction of positive trophic cascades where are lots of other things benefit and the whole process of ecological succession and vegetation recovery takes place spontaneously this is the same area showing the fence line and these are the pine trees in both photographs that we planted and the photograph on the left has got mature trees in it and those have regenerated naturally inside the fence and the fence forms a very clear boundary in both images inside the fence you can see there's heather and flower there's lots of young trees growing and outside there's only grass and stumps and the photograph on the right is particularly telling because the Heather's in Washington's abundance there's bog mercial in the bottom left of the photograph which is an aromatic shrub which is a nitrogen fixer it improves the soils but it's also highly palatable to deer so there's none of it outside the fence didn't plant it it came by itself but outside the fence in that photograph you can see what we call peat hags those gaping wounds in our landscape where the forces of erosion have expose the underlying Pete Brown earth and in those we see the stumps of the vanished forests so that's the painful landscape and a contrasts with what I would term the wild garden inside the fence all we've done is plant trees and keep deer out everything else comes back by itself so we're looking to restore healthy vegetation communities natural ecosystems a forest that will look like it has been growing by itself and that will be the measure of our success if in 50 years time the people who come to this landscape then are unable to tell that these trees were planted because they'll be irregularly spaced they'll be uneven in height because some are in better soil conditions and others will be gaps or the openings it will look natural that's what we're aiming for and the vegetation recovery sometimes takes on a seemingly miraculous effects this is an area here and sees the three photographs in a very remote part of the upper Afric watershed where there are no trees for several kilometers in any direction and we found a tiny seedling of an eared willow bush growing beside the river and the seats of eared will were very light they can travel for a long way on the wind and it was heavily suppressed by deer we put a small area of stop fence around it probably about some five meters by three meters in size and the world began to grow but remarkably seven years after we put the fence up we found bluebells flowering there now bluebells are a component of our oak woodlands in particular and there's no Oaks for kilometres and kilometres over 20 kilometres away there's no bluebells for at least 23 kilometres how did they get there you know were the seats in the seed bank there for potentially centuries because it's century since was any woodland there and once we got them protected those bluebells multiplied there was over a hundred at one stage there plus other flowers and that was a tiny tiny little island in this otherwise treeless landscape and it shows what can be achieved and we find that even the P tags that are referred to before those most desolate areas those open wounds whose gaping sores in the land recover given time the earth does not like to be bare anybody who's a gardener I think knows that we go out in the spring and we read our garden so we can plant our vegetables or our flowers and what happens of course the weeds start growing again because plants hold the soil in place it's unnatural for the earth to be bare so Pete hogs are highly unnatural and they're only there again because excessive numbers of herbivores prevent vegetation recovery so in the areas who are we fenced off P tags or with planting trees nearby we find that they to do recover and these photographs here show that the one on the right is a former pit hag there's still a bit of a stump of a pine root for true ting through there but swag no moss cross leaved he sundews and other plants have grown up and colonized the bear peat and the area has revegetated and it heals over time we just need to allow the space for that to happen so once we get the vegetation recovering we find other elements of the ecosystem returning by themselves insects are usually the first things to arrive because they've got a habitat and we find that the insects come and feed on the leaves and they bring their own suite of predators with them as well here in the top left there's a photograph of the northern Egger moth feeding on an eared willow bush that we protected and the top right is a rather spectacular insect a parasitoid and new mid wasp which specializes in parasitizing that northern Egger moth caterpillar it lays an egg inside the caterpillar and the wasps larva rather grotesquely consumes the caterpillar from the inside and those insects of course attract insect Everest birds and the insect Everest birds sometimes bring seeds in their guts and plants germinate from that so the whole web of life begins to get re-established bottom left there we see a gall induced by a soft fly again on the same willow brush so as a whole diversity of insect species coming back that's the start of these positive trophic cascades that we see we get these unexpected unpredicted knock-on positive results as the web of life begins to read we've had a particular focus on aspen trees in scotland because it's probably the species that has suffered most from deforestation aspen is one of our indigenous species very palatable to deer and it suffers from the fact that it is very rarely flowers and therefore very rarely set seed it's also a dioecious species so an individual aspen tree is either male or female not both most of our species in Scotland are monoecious birch Oak Pine male and female flowers occur in the same tree Aspen and individually either male or female and because it spreads clonally if you get a group of aspen stands a group of aspen trunks together they're actually all the same organism because they're growing off the same root system and all the same gender they're all either male or female and the next Aspen stand might be kilometers away so because they hardly ever flower seat production is virtually impossible and then when Aspen is removed from most of the landscape as it has been it will never get back by itself because there's no seeds so we call we propagate Aspen from root cuttings and plant Aspen out but we also protect the suckers because the suckers grow quickly and are highly palatable and year so they need to be protected and this is an example here where we found suckers on the land that we own growing off the roots of a parent aspen tree put a net lawn tree guard around them and in ten weeks the sucker grew four feet that's over a meter that's a tropical ratio of growth if nothing else grows that quickly in Scotland but what was even more remarkable was that that Aspen sucker in those ten weeks formed the habitat for two species of invertebrates Tara Como tremouille is an aphid that specialize in sucking this happen of aspen trees and it secretes a clear liquid called honeydew as a waste product and that is the primary food source for wood ants and would answer one of our keystone species in the invertebrate community they fulfill a vital role within the forest ecosystem so within ten weeks by allowing just one Aspen soccer to grow successfully we had created the habitat for two species of invertebrate so we get this recovery of other life-forms as soon as there's a habitat for them not just invertebrates but here we see a butterfly on the green hairstreak the crest eat it one of our characteristic particular bird species of the Caledonian forest recovers when the pine forest forest and the bottom-left photograph here very interesting this is a soft fly larvae feeding on dwarf birch now dwarf birch is part of what we call the Montaigne scrub community which is the ecosystem that grows at the edge of woodland when it reaches its limit going up mountain sites the trees get smaller more stunted in size and just before we get into the Alpine environment you get the special band of Montaigne scrub and the things the plants they only grow about waist height which is dinner table height for deer so there's virtually no examples of this montane scrub community left in Scotland today on our land we've got some of the best including dwarf birch which is a species of birch that typically grows waist height at most but in Scotland it's highly suppressed and we've enabled it to grow by protecting it and we've got these soft lines two different species feeding on the dwarf birch now there's host specific two dwarf birch not found anywhere else in the UK so we've created a habitat for them we find these ecological relationships re-establishing and unexpected ways we ran an experiment for seven years in our land with wild boar one of our missing mammal species we weren't able to turn them loose because you have to get official permission in a very bureaucratic process for that very complex so we have them inside a fence as an experiment to see would they a control Bracken which is a fern that has spread out of control because of taking opportunistic taking open opportunities for the fragmented nature of our landscape and wood they also the borer fulfil a function in disturbing the soil and creating the opportunity for tree seeds to germinate within a day of having the borer back we found that they were being followed by Robins one of our native bird species and this is a well known phenomenon in and Europe were boar had never been hunted out and in the absence of boar in Scotland for 300 years and the Robins have begun using a surrogate gardeners so when people think their garden the Robins appear because they look in the disturbed ground for worms and grubs so within 24 hours of us having boar back the Robins had remembered their ecological relationship and were following them around and that particular winter when we got the boars very cold so you can see the Robins got very close indeed to the boar to hide to find the bare earth where they could look for food so the next stage really then and this final element of the restoration puzzle is getting the missing species back and we've taken some tentative steps to that in Scotland we've reintroduced a couple of birds of prey the sea eagle and the red kite the the frontline is really getting the terrestrial large mammals back and as a member of the European Union at the moment Scotland is obligated to investigate the feasibility and desirability of returning missing species so there's been a five-year trial on the safe option the beaver a herbivore not perceived as a threat to people directly at least and that's been run there's been huge stacks of documents produced about the effects and consequences of it and we're waiting for a decision from the Scottish government are they going to allow further beaver reintroductions or not do in a few months we hope so it's very clear from an ecological point of view the Beavers bring multiple benefits they're a keystone species in aquatic and riparian ecosystems Bor have already touched upon there are in other parts of Scotland feral boar that have either escaped or been released and they're out there spreading so we've got two of our missing species effectively back in the landscape at the moment although though their futures still not assured but the crucial next step is not just bringing back the ones that are missing but it's also ones who are still surviving in Scotland but are absent from big parts of the former range so we're running a project on translocation of red squirrels now the red squirrel is one of our iconic surviving species Scotland is the threat the stronghold for it because it's disappeared from most of England due to being out competed by the non neigh introduced grey squirrel that's been brought in from North America which outcompetes it for food and transmitted squirrel parks a virus that's lethal to Reds but doesn't affect the gray squirrels so the Reds range has been contracting and contracting and the Caledonian forest is now the last stronghold in Britain for the species but in much of the North West Highlands because of the fragmented nature of the Caledonian forest we've got these little isolated stands of pine woods where there are no squirrels of any sort and they're geographically remote from the next nearest remnant and squirrels cannot spread over large areas of chile's ground so these islands of woodland are bereft of squirrels and the squirrels of course a seed disperser so there's an ecological function missing as well as a mammal so we've been collecting squirrels from areas of red great red squirrels this is from areas where they're abundant and translocating them into these fragmented isolated woodlands as part of a translocation process rather than a reintroduction process to restore more of the full complement of biota to these depleted ecosystems but beyond that the next stage really is getting the terrestrial predators back and in our view will never have healthy self-sustaining natural ecosystems until we get the apex predators back in place and work in other countries such as the USA where wolves have been returned to Yellowstone have demonstrated the very tangible benefits that you get you know the positive trophic cascades that we get once a top predator is put back in place briefly to summarize we've developed a set of principles of ecological restoration that guide our work and the first of those I referred to earlier the inspire in part by the Bradley sisters you work from areas of strength start from where the ecosystem is closest to its natural state you've got a head start then two basic things from pay attention number to pay attention to keystone species those species which have a disproportionate effect relative to their actual numbers utilize pioneer species and processes like natural ecological succession and because that's how nature would do the job herself mimic nature wherever possible and also replicate those natural processes recreate ecological niches where they've been lost in many forests in Britain and elsewhere around the world Deadwood for instance is totally absent it's cleared away it's unsightly and that removes the habitat for a whole range of species in the detract of our community re-establish ecological linkages where they've been lost those things that connect one species to another like providing the the Aspen soccer growing as the habitat for the aphids and the wood ants control and or remove introduced non-native species very important because invasive non-native species are one of the biggest threats to biodiversity on every continent today and we've got our share of them in Scotland as well non-native trees like Sitka spruce that are the backbone of our plantation forestry industry we've got American mink we've got Japanese knotweed we've got rhododendron from Turkey and the list goes on and on so we spent some of our time controlling non native plants in particular and removing regenerating Sitka spruce and rhododendron you remove or mitigates the limiting factors that prevent restoration from occurring naturally so that's a way to gain much more leverage if we can actually get the the block out of the system then nature will do a lot of the job herself and in Scotland that block is the disproportionate excess of numbers of large herbivores so if we can reduce those then the whole process will occur without the need for active ongoing intensive human management pay special attention to species that have limited ability to disperse by themselves I already mentioned the red squirrel wood ants is another case in point they reproduce by the winged Queens and males mating in flight in the summer and they disperse in the air about 100 meters so if woodlands are separated by larger areas than that and answer missing they'll never get back twin flower and Aspen both other species again that have this problem then we have to reintroduce the species that are unlikely or impossible to return by themselves again cause Britain's an island species that are totally extirpated the links the wolf and so forth have to be physically brought back in re-establish the crucial ecological processes that are not functioning at the moment so that's things like predator prey dynamics nutrient cycling natural disturbance allowing perhaps occasional wildfires or flooding events to occur because that creates heterogeneity in the ecosystem let nature do most of the work and then perhaps most interestingly of all it's not just how the work we do is the quality with how we do it what I call the green thumb principle this idea that you know somebody's got a green thumb they've got a special connection with nature their houseplants never seem to get insect pests their roses always bloom later in the year than everybody else you know many of us know somebody who's got a green thumb actually think it's not a green thumb it's a green heart because it's the quality of the heart that makes the difference they pour their love and care into their work and that has a nurturing effect on the life force of everything and it makes a tangible difference so ecological restoration is the work then moving into more of a human sphere it's the work that reconnects us and we need to become re worn into the web of life just like everything else because we've fragmented ourselves we've separated ourselves out in urban environments and most of us are denied our birthright of daily contact with wild nature so engaging in restoration work and most of our work at trees for life is done by volunteers they've planted over a million trees so far and lots of other work as well and helps those volunteers to reconnect with some of the most important things that we need for healthy human lives so it reconnects us with the rest of nature that's very obvious it reconnects us with place because we have to know the place that we're restoring we have to know the hydrology the soil conditions the weather patterns and all of that it reconnects us with life very important at a time when so much of our human culture is fixated on death and destruction violence and terrorism and everything we need to refocus on positivity on life it connects us with each other because volunteers come together from different backgrounds and discover to share passion and shared concern for the future of the earth and for the planet it connects us with our own power many people feel like they would like to do something to make a positive difference in the world today but don't know what to do so coming and planting a tree engaging in restoration work really gives people a sense of empowerment because that tree might live for 300 or 500 years restoration connects people with healing because it's an age act of healing a landscape but in healing landscape we also engage with the healing qualities in ourselves and we all need healing in some form or other restoration connects us with hope quality that's desperately needed in the world today and when I plant a tree is a statement of hope that that tree is going to be there for several hundred years and it connects us with spirit the spirit of the land of the Spirit of ourselves and the spirit in each other very important again the restoration provides an opportunity for people to make a meaningful positive contribution for the benefit of all life on Earth and I think many people feel an Eden an urge to do something how can we change the world for the better so restoration is a labor of love it's a gift to future generations my son's grandchildren will see the fruits of the labor of love that we are engaged in today because they're the ones who will enjoy the mature forest that results from the seedlings we plant so it's a gift for the future is passing the world on to future generations in a better condition than we inherited it from the past in summary then there's one other elements I think is really important to emphasize I mentioned earlier when I started this thirty years ago I had no training I had no knowledge no background no resources but by following my heart following my passion and communicating that to other people lots of support has come it's a such an extent that I got an email one day from a woman who was dying of cancer and said she had money she wanted to give it to an organization that would plant change in a store a wild forest in Scotland had found our website where we interested we got about 900 thousand pounds you know from that and that enabled us to buy 10,000 acres 4,000 hectares of land to do a significant restoration project on so that's the sort of thing that happens and I think the other real statement or example I'd like to have my work be not just restoring the forest but actually to share with people that we are very powerful as individuals when we follow our hearts when we share our enthusiasm and passion it's infectious it's magnetic and there are no limits to what we can be achieved and I see this when I travel the world and I meet other people who are engaged in restoration work it's not happening at a government level it's not happening at a big institutional level most of it is taking place on a personal level individual people local communities saying hey our environments in bad shape we need to do something about it they're usually starting with nothing and they're finding a way to make it work and that is how the world is changing and for Emily who's watching this who has thoughts about well wouldn't it be great if somebody did something about my local environment well why not you because you're no different to me you've all got the same abilities to do that and I'm no more powerful than anybody else I've just learned to harness my own passion and to share it and to channel effectively and each one of us can do that and that is how the world is going to change and that's how we're going to restore our wounded planet

Channel: regenTV

Views: 6,615

Rating: 4.9574466 out of 5

Keywords: Can we restore the Caledonian forests?, Scottish forests, rewilding, Assisted regeneration, Bradley method, Ecological principles, Ecosystem function, Habitat restoration, Landscape connectivity, Natural regeneration, Pest species, Reference ecosystems, Remnant vegetation, Replanting, Soil stability, Vegetation associations, Ecological restoration, Ecosystem Resilience, Society for Ecological Restoration Australasia, RegenTV, AABR, Australian Association of Bush Regenerators

Id: HFR4yhu99OY

Length: 43min 54sec (2634 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019