Recent heather burning on Bradfield Moor, the Peak District leaves land looking like this…
…which doesn’t act very well in holding water in the hills.
A woodland would be much better at holding water. I wonder how we could get a woodland to grow in the Peak District? How about, stopping burning the land?
The LibDems want to plant 60 million trees a year when they sweep into government (see here illustrated with an image of rows and rows of tree guards that are usually plastic) whereas the more conservative Conservative Party, which has failed to meet its tree-planting targets in government, sets a target of 30 million trees per year.
I’m fairly sure that neither party has a clue as to where these trees might go, but it stands to reason that wide open spaces could be wide wooded spaces, and any ecologist will tell you that much of the UK, if left to its own devices, would try very hard to become a forest without any help. A bit of help would be good, but it isn’t necessarily needed.
National Parks – a good place to start with restoring the natural tree line of the UK, reducing downstream flooding, improving water quality and storing lots of carbon?
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We need to make sure that this does not become an excuse to have even more plantations of alien softwoods, primarily Sitka Spruce in our uplands rather than native woodland. As you say Mark given the right conditions and management trees colonise on their own creating much better woodland habitats than we ever could. Of course the natural colonisation also does it without all those ‘orrble plastic tubes too.
Planted trees of course do not have a proper woodland ecology with all the benefits for some considerable number of years and tight plantations of aliens never.
If we stopped burning the Moors, first would come the silver birch, followed quickly by rowan. It’s a pattern that’s common on Moors not managed for DGS or in the cloughs within those moors. Nature wouldn’t need any help, other than to be left alone to do what it does best and fill a gap.
And we wont need those plastic tubes if we get our deer management in both lowlands an uplands right… because we wont need to protect from browsing (OK, we might need to cull a few grey squirrel too, but they taste almost as good as venison)