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Save Kintyre's Temperate Rainforest Survey - Discover and Protect Kintyre's Hidden Gem
Reclaim Kintyre's Rainforest: Mapping Rhododendron Invasion
Scottish rainforest is found in Argyll and the west Highlands – where the climate is wettest. The humidity, along with the high rainfall and variety of soils, creates perfect conditions for more than 500 species of mosses, ferns, lichens and liverworts. In fact, some species have their ‘world headquarters’ in the area. A handful are found nowhere else.
First, if you want to know where you can find the rainforests checkout the Native Woodland Survey of Scotland Data Explorer then follow the links.
Bullet points for why our forest is important, might include:
- Mitigating and Sequestering Carbon, both via the trees and the biomass associated with them. Recent research has shown that temperate rainforests (and adjacent peatlands) store vastly more carbon than tropical rainforests….
- Biodiversity - these stands have ancient trees, lichens, mosses, ferns, liverworts, fungi (including vast underground mycorrhizal networks) and plant life often found no where else. And they are home to many animals: deer, otter, pine martin, red squirrel, peregrine, ravens, eagles, woodcock, heron, badgers, fox, weasels and stoats, adder, slow worms and so on.
- Other: there are so many other reasons that we could list, relating to mental health, potential medicinal uses, ecological reservoirs, and I encourage everyone to add what matters to them.
Finally, what comes next.
- Promote: keep learning and teaching others how important the rainforest is. We can have regular meetings, forest visits and start publicising what we know?
- Record: locate all Kintyre forests and start recording what we find in them. We might need people with specialist expertise to do this properly, but we can at least start!
- Protect:
- put pressure on Forestry Land Scotland and Wind Farm developments to allow for a process of natural regeneration, rather than replanting spruce or importing potentially diseased trees from elsewhere;
- organise a feasibility study to control the rhododendron and deer, and give our forest a fighting chance to regenerate in the future. This could be a good test case for elsewhere, doing this properly is going to be a very long term commitment - and a very expensive one. Even the feasibility study is a big task and we are going to need all the help we can get in funding and managing the process.
Further reading Links:
https://www.plantlife.org.uk/our-work/saving-scotlands-rainforest-project/#:~:text=The%20high%20rainfall%20and%20mild,make%20Scotland%27s%20rainforest%20so%20unique
https://www.nature.scot/landscapes-and-habitats/habitat-types/woodland-habitats/scotlands-rainforest
Books:
Guy Shrubsole, Lost Rainforests of Britain: https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/the-lost-rainforests-of-britain-guy-shrubsole?variant=40178429624398
Suzanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602589/finding-the-mother-tree-by-suzanne-simard/
Podcasts:
https://savingscotlandsrainforest.org.uk/podcasts
https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other
