Past woodland dynamics was unearthed from this small peat-infilled forest hollow, providing valuable insights into drivers of change in ancient temperate woodland in Scotland with implications for future management.
Photographer credit to the lead author, Dr Annabel Everard.

By Annabel Everard, J. Edward Schofield, Timothy Mighall, Scott Timpany, and Gill Plunkett.

Read the full paper here.

Woodland management is often motivated by the need to promote biodiversity and resilience to future threats, such as from tree diseases or climate change. This can leave woodland restoration efforts aiming for as close to natural conditions as feasible. However, modern ecological records of woodlands are limited to the most recent century and, being on a timescale shorter than the life span of common long-lived trees such as oak, may overlook substantial past woodland change.

In this study we investigated the ‘naturalness’ of an ancient broadleaved woodland in Scotland considered to be of high-conservation value, and as potential reference conditions for ecosystem restoration. We analysed plant remains preserved in pockets of peat soils (e.g. pollen, spores, seeds, plant fragments), fungal spores and charcoal from within the woodland, as a novel application of stand-scale multi-proxy palaeoecology. These palaeoecological records are used to tell us what tree and ground flora species used to be present within the woodland, about past woodland structures, and how the woodland has responded to past disturbances by, for example, grazing herbivores, fire, climatic changes, and human-woodland interactions. These woodland records extend over the last 1700 years, thus span multiple generations of trees.

Our investigation highlighted the vulnerability of woodland management to the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’; meaning our perception of ‘natural’ woodland conditions – based largely on studies of modern woodlands – has been skewed towards less diverse woodland structures and compositions, with implications for their conservation value. A trajectory into less favourable woodland conditions, with lower plant diversity and limited natural tree regeneration developed with cessation of small-scale canopy disturbance, such as from local fires, and long-term (often intensive) grazing. Human-woodland interactions locally intensified from the 18th century and were an important component of past woodland dynamics.