Atlantic woodland health: long term interations between climate, ecology and management

Forest health is a growing, international concern, with most attention focused on climatic drivers and regions with large tracts of forest cover. By contrast, relatively little is known about how climate change influences forest resilience in landscapes where woodland cover is limited and its composition is strongly influenced by cultural legacies. This gap in knowledge is exacerbated by current evaluation methods, since ecological time-series studies are too short to understand lagged responses and potential disequilibrium between woodland responses, climate shifts and management legacies. These issues are particularly relevant in longsettled landscapes, like Europe. This project will focus on temperate Atlantic woodland communities in NW Scotland to explore how climate change - particularly warmer and abrupt shifts - and human impacts interact to influence woodland health, measured through palaeoecological evidence for diversity, continuity and capacity to recover from perturbations.

Our understanding of deciduous woodland dynamics in NW Europe is dominated by the paradigm of widespread human-induced clearance during the mid- Holocene, followed by selective management pressures in the historic period. Cultural impacts are, overwhelmingly, assumed to lead to ecosystem deterioration, which undermines efforts to manage relict woods in a way that recognises and maintains both their cultural and conservation values.

'Temperate rainforest' in NW Scotland is fragmented, as is our understanding of its sensitivity to environmental change and the level of continuity from prehistoric woodland communities. Palaeoecological evidence from coniferous woods further east suggest that deciduous taxa may be more competitive during phases of climatic warming, analogous to current conditions. However, the data are too limited to assess whether oceanic conditions near western range limits provide microclimates suited to population recovery, or whether some forms of management disturbance are compatible with continuity and regeneration.