Challenges
The increasing number of companies and organizations that are committing to reducing their carbon emissions is leading to a greater demand for investment in restoring woodland habitats. This is because these habitats can help absorb carbon and offset the emissions that organizations still produce. However, it's not always easy or without risk to get the most carbon-absorbing benefits from restoring woodland in Scotland. There needs to be a better understanding of how to do this in a way that also brings other benefits to society and reduces the risk of failure.
Climate change will also affect the ability of trees to absorb carbon, and different restoration investors may have different goals and levels of uncertainty, which can impact the outcome of these projects. It's important to carefully consider these factors and assess any potential unintended consequences.
In Scotland, a common land management practice is called "muirburn," which involves prescribed burning on moorlands where grouse shooting is a major land use. However, there is still a lot of debate and uncertainty around the effects of muirburn on biodiversity and how it interacts with wildfires.
Scotland's Atlantic Oakwoods are an important habitat for a variety of species, but there is limited knowledge about how these ecosystems work and how to best protect and restore them. This includes a lack of understanding of the diversity of the soil biota, which is critical for developing effective management strategies.
The government is taking steps to reverse the loss of biodiversity by encouraging more environmentally friendly land use practices and habitat restoration. However, to be effective, it's important to know where to focus these efforts and how to measure the success of these efforts.
Questions
- How can we monitor an outcomes-based approach and provide the scientific and social evidence for the best approaches? Can monitoring be designed into these schemes so that they are more adaptive to change and emerging knowledge?
- Can we develop a major map-based habitat restoration model, which considers the carbon, nature, connectivity, socio-economic, non-stationary climate risks, and biosecurity issues? What are the life-cycle risks, costs and benefits associated with carbon sequestration proposals, including commercial and non-commercial woodland?
- How can we maximise biodiversity and societal benefits from natural carbon capture, for example through ecosystems supporting rich or scarce species assemblages, and providing benefits to people through disaster mitigation, harvesting or wellbeing?
Solutions
This project aims to assess how specific land uses and management activities affect biodiversity and ecosystem services to inform land use policy.
Multiple benefits of woodland habitat restoration
This project defines the restoration at the landscape scale and the parcel scale as interventions to improve the flow of benefits. We concentrate on native woodlands, exploring and mapping criteria for their restoration and expansion and the flow of benefits likely derived from them. At the landscape level, we are focusing on fragmentation. To better understand the need for landscape-scale intervention, we are assessing the vulnerability (in terms of loss of niche space and risk of fragmentation) to climatic change of existing and future woodlands.
We combine mixed methods and a sociological approach to the qualitative and quantitative analyses of data on multiple benefits of woodland habitat restoration (and to whom the benefits flow) with, map-based integrated socio-biophysical modelling of the risk of unintended consequences of different restoration scenarios for Scotland under conditions of climate change. The role of individual investor decision-making under uncertainty is being examined when modelling the impacts of investors’ restoration decisions on carbon storage and other benefits. Combined, these interdisciplinary approaches will allow the co-production of new knowledge on how to support high-quality woodland habitat restoration activities for multiple benefits to society, and how much land might be available for such activities.
Case studies of habitat restoration and management
This project is producing case studies of habitat restoration and management and their impact on biodiversity and the distribution and intensity of muirburn across mainland Scotland and wildfire occurrence to assess how these interact and influence biodiversity. Mechanical removal (cutting/mowing) is being considered as an alternative to muirburn, but its relative impact on fire risk (linked to activities in the CentrePeat project), soils, or biodiversity are unknown. The outputs of this work are directly informing policy and other stakeholders of the biodiversity impacts of and interaction between muirburn and wildfire and provide evidence of the relative effects of mechanical removal compared to muirburn.
Ancient woodland restoration
We are producing a case study on habitat restoration and management, and their impact on biodiversity which focuses on two of Scotland’s most important native woodland habitats: Atlantic Oakwoods and Caledonian Pinewoods. Atlantic Oakwoods are of international importance and renowned for the high diversity of lower plants and lichens. However, many are in poor condition, in part due to underplanting with conifers. Considerable resources have been spent on restoring these Plantations in Ancient Woodlands (PAW sites) by removing the conifers. Many Caledonian Pinewoods are also in poor condition, due to lack of regeneration, but often have neighbouring plantations of Scots pine. We do not know enough about how pristine woodlands function, how the functioning of the plantations differs from the native woodlands, nor, in the case of the Oakwoods, how successful restoration efforts have been.
We focus on assessing the change in ecosystem properties when plantations are established on ancient woodland sites, and how successful restoration is to restore these sites. We also examine the biodiversity associated with the woodlands across several trophic levels and kingdoms, focusing on non-vascular plants and lichenised fungi above ground and the myriad of organisms below ground.
Project Partners
Progress
Socio-economic and biophysical impacts of restoration
Objectives for examining socio-economic and biophysical benefits of woodland restoration and expansion have been achieved. A wide range of interdisciplinary data and literature were assessed, highlighting the low availability of socio-economic data at the local scale. To improve this situation, exploratory spatial analyses of data collated, currently focusing on a region around Oban (to link to Oakwood Restoration), are being utilised to identify flows of benefits that can be mapped from local woodland expansion activities - by different types of investors and landowners - outwards to other stakeholders at different geographical scales. Integrated bio-physical modelling has produced distribution and connectivity maps representing aspects of vulnerability in the creation of native woodland corridors to climate change impacts. Multi-stakeholder engagement has been ongoing including the collation of stakeholders' definitions of quality woodland restoration as well as website development.
Muirburn
At the request of Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS), research proposals on muirburn impacts were revised in consultation with stakeholders. Data on muirburn and wildfire sources were identified, compiled and used in GIS spatial analyses of overlap between wildfires and muirburn. This indicated that wildfires cover a proportionately greater area outside than within muirburn areas. Field sites have been agreed with stakeholders which will contrast impacts of burning and mowing on above and belowground parameters at The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) Abernethy and at the James Hutton Institute's Glensaugh farm. The impact of muirburn on soil nematode community composition, a recognised proxy indicator of soil functional biodiversity, was carried out. DNA techniques characterised nematode communities along transects within and out with fire areas over a period of 12 months after fire. Sampling time had a greater driver on nematode community composition than the direct impact of fire. However, a clear interaction of fire and sampling time, suggest that fire effects on soil nematodes are short-lived.
Oakwood restoration
Year 1 has focused on the restoration of Atlantic Oakwoods previously converted to commercial conifer plantations. A decision was made, in consultation with RESAS, that an intensive investigation of a single site with a known history would yield more reliable baseline data than less detailed investigations across highly variable sites. Glen Creran, near Oban, originally suggested by Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), was selected and studied intensively. Seven replicate plots were established in six habitats: plantation, regeneration sites on different soil types, and ancient managed and near-natural ancient oak woodland. Chemical and biological characterisation of soils and surveys of tree epiphytes have been carried out. Analyses demonstrate striking differences in soil pH and nutrients among habitats potentially reflecting disturbance during restoration but also local soil conditions. Next generation sequencing has been used to characterise soil fungi, bacteria, archaea, nematodes and all eukaryotes. Data compilation will be completed by year end, allowing drivers of diversity to be analysed in Year 2.
Related Projects
There remain large gaps in understanding how changes in management and the environment alter community composition and, hence, ecosystem functions. This Research Deliverable (RD) addresses how ecosystem functions are regulated by the traits of species present, and how potential limits for the maintenance of ecosystem function can be captured in ecosystem health metrics. It also has the aim of...
- Biodiversity
- 2016-2022
Resilience of ecosystems and biodiversity. This work aims to study the different aspects of resilience of widlife species and natural ecosystems to improve our understanding of how biodiversity and ecosystems are likely to change in response to environmental and climate change, and how to manage them to increase their resilience to change.
- Biodiversity
- Natural Capital
- 2016-2022