Linking Landscapes – pathways to the future? Q&A

CONFERENCE 2011 LINKING LANDSCAPES Q&A

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Linking Landscapes – pathways to the future?

All questions from the audience and answers from all sessions, and plenary Question: Do you move plant species to try and protect them? Is it worth moving them?

Steve Aylward: What has been done, particularly with a number of privately owned and other community sites is to use green hay or collected wild flower seed (using a seed harvesting device) from hay meadows or from acid grassland or even heathland and use that to improve diversity, rather than translocation. This method is well established and quite successful for improving botanical diversity on sites.

Julian Roughton: And I think where there has been habitat restoration work at sites like Redgrave and Lopham Fen or indeed in the Broads, what is amazing is how the seeds in the peat have survived over decades even though the species have disappeared. A species such as marsh pea has reoccurred where it hadn’t been seen for years and also sundew at Redgrave and Lopham Fen. Question: What approaches are other Wildlife Trusts taking in other parts of the country?

Steve Aylward: All of the wildlife trusts have adopted the living landscape vision. The interpretation of it varies a little from one county to another, but the overall drivers which are about reconnecting habitats, about making sites larger and more robust and more able to cope with change is the common theme. So the implementation may vary across the country but the objectives are much the same.

Question: Would deciduous corridors help red squirrels?

Steve Aylward: Sadly, we have lost red squirrels from Suffolk, but our dormouse work in the south of Suffolk is a good example of where using hedges or any sort of deciduous corridor makes a substantial difference in terms of reconnecting dormouse populations.

Julian Roughton: There was a project to reintroduce red squirrels in the largest block of conifers in East Anglia, namely Thetford Forest. It was thought red squirrels were likely to survive there because grey squirrels were better adapted to deciduous woodland. Unfortunately, the project in Thetford Forest quickly came to an end, the red squirrels succumbing to the parapox virus.

Question: Can you confirm that it is conifer strips that red squirrels like not broadleaved species?

Julian Roughton: That is absolutely what is happening where the red squirrel populations survive in northern England. Removal of broadleaved species is key on one of the large Forestry Commission estates where they had been planted for landscape reasons to make it more of a conifer block to safeguard red squirrel populations.

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Question: Are there any barriers to organisations such as the Suffolk Wildlife Trust?

Steve Aylward: For farmers there has to be an economic as well as a wildlife case for making the decisions they have to make on their land. So Higher Level Stewardship scheme administered by Natural England is an important tool for encouraging private land owners to take measures on their land to improve wildlife. Land acquisition alone will not create the landscape-scale change that we seek over time. It will involve private landowners and environmental stewardship schemes will be a key part of that. But there are also other issues like water availability and the way it is used and managed.

For wetlands sites, sustainable use of water resources is critical for some areas.

Question: As part of the water management plan at Pashford Fen, do we know how much of the water ended up on the golf course at Lakenheath air base?

Steve Aylward: We don’t know exactly, but Pashford is a good example of where, despite there being a water level management plan, trying to implement it in a way which was going to make a real difference was really what proved impossible at the end of the day. It needs a complete landscape scale approach to address the issue of water levels particularly on this Breck edge where small fragmented sites are particularly vulnerable. They are very challenging to resolve.

Question: What are organisations like the NFU actually doing as part of their education programme to raise awareness of environmental issues that surround farming?

John Cousins: The NFU pay lip service to green issues to a large extent. The Country Land and Business Association are better because a lot of its members are very green farmers and they happen to own large estates with lots of parkland. Education needs to improve – it is such a trump card for farmers to start stressing what they do for the environment but the NFU, looking mainly at food security, are allowing it to slip off the agenda. We need better information coming through to schools, not just about how wonderful farming and food production is, but how wonderful farms are as potential nature reserves (which is what they have ‘almost’ got to be) and how they can link up with existing nature reserves.

Question: How does the Futurescapes project fit into the introduction of large apex species?

Aidan Lonergan: I will give you my personal view to this very interesting question. All things should be considered. There is a school of thought amongst scientists because of climate change issues that not only should we be reintroducing species but we should be actually moving them to a place where the climate envelope is more suitable as an investment. Iberian Lynx was recently in the media, taking it from Iberia and getting it to colonise

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some other place. However, we must bear in mind that the landscape has changed significantly since some of these apex species disappeared. The population has increased and you just have to moderate the kind of pure ‘let us reintroduce’ with ‘how it is actually going to work out?’

The other thing I would say is that you have to have your communications right on this before you even dip your toe in the water - there needs to be a long run-in time. I was involved in the red kite reintroduction in Northern Ireland. We had to get bounty records from 250 years ago before we could prove they were actually at the release site even though there was proof of their presence in the rest of Ireland. It is also always worth bearing in mind that the high profile stuff attracts money and attention, kudos, media coverage and all the rest of it. Some of the bread and butter stuff, which we haven’t actually got right yet, needs to plough away over a long time. I do worry about the diversification of resources into something ‘sexy’, but personally I think those things should be considered.

Question: Does devolution in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales make it easier to work with them than the systems in England?

Aidan Lonergan: I wouldn’t say it makes it easier or difficult, I would say it makes it more challenging. If you have a piece of legislation in England, the odds are that in Scotland they will try and do a better version of it. Wales will be progressive and Northern Ireland will come in behind and wait and see what happens. The challenge for any NGO is to gear itself up to understanding the local environment and tap into the thinking of local politicians. Also, the language you use about these things is hugely sensitive the minute you go outside England. It has to be really high on your agenda to get the positioning, the language and the look and feel of your advocacy appropriate to the devolved Government, because they will react negatively if you don’t.

Question: Matt Shardlow mentioned SSSIs and said that there were plenty of SSSIs which covered birds and plants but not invertebrates. But the proof of the matter is that an enormous percentage of our SSSIs are deteriorating.

How are we going to cope with that?

Matt Shardlow: I wouldn’t disagree with you. They have had a target to get 95% into favourable condition. But as we know that target includes ‘unfavourable recovering’. The NGOs are looking for a new target on SSSIs, ones that will be favourable condition minus unfavourable recovering, which would be a more rational approach in the longer term. However, until those problems are fixed, we can’t really say that those sites are in good condition.

A bit more information on the paucity of invertebrate data: to give an example, the Sandwich click beetle occurs only on four sites in the country. It occurs at Shoeburyness Ranges - an SSSI, but it is not actually mentioned on the SSSI notification. When a developer wanted to put a flood barrier through the area of the habitat, Natural England didn’t object because that species wasn’t mentioned on the SSSI notification. Now Natural England has said that they are doing a review of what is on the notified list and a review of the

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series. We can only hope that this is a high enough priority. We have got situations where the whole of a population of an endangered species is off an SSSI, whereas with birds, there isn’t a single bird species where the whole of the bird population is not protected by an SSSI. Question: How do you propose to remove the bracken in Staverton Park, taking into account the dead wood which is lying on the ground?

Oliver Rackham: I am not the owner of Staverton Park but, if it were me, the objective would not be to remove bracken altogether because that would be too difficult, but to move dead wood into places where it would not interfere with bracken rolling.

Question: According to my information fallow deer and red deer have been reintroduced into Staverton Park into fenced enclosures. What impact will that have on Staverton Park?

Oliver Rackham: There have been deer enclosures within Staverton for at least 15 years and certainly it makes a difference. There is less bracken in the deer area. I think the deer are fed within those enclosures. There has been a great proliferation of Hound’s Tongue and, as far as I know, the heather has not reappeared in that area. What one has to remember is that the original objective in Staverton Park was for keeping captive deer in.

Question: If I was emperor of Suffolk, I would command that B-lines be drawn across the county; can I ask members of the panel if they think that is such a good idea?

Chris Baines: Yes, it is a very good idea and I wouldn’t be so precise as to describe them as lines in the first place, but to actually think about continuous tracks within which people could be encouraged, and possibly funded, to change their management policy. You may remember I mentioned the high-speed rail link - there is another example. We can be doing much more with things like the network of canals as with network of railways.

Rather than starting from scratch and describing a new line completely across open agricultural landscapes, we could do more perhaps with just encouraging an extra buffer along the edges of some of those existing corridors. It is going to be interesting to see what happens with the shift from British Waterways to this new charitable trust that the waterways have been handed over to, whether there is an opportunity there to actually get them to think beyond the edge of the towpath and their very narrow corridor and to influence a much wider zone.

Question: Would linking fragmented populations increase the possibility of spreading disease, so putting populations at risk? And how will linking those populations impact on the genetic variability of separating populations?

Oliver Rackham: Well, the answer to the first one, as I have already said, is yes. But how serious this is I find it very difficult to say and it will no doubt vary from one organism to another. Linking fragmented populations can only make things easier for pathogens.

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As for how will linking these populations impact on the genetic variability of separating populations? In the case of woodland, one has to remember that the separation has been around long enough for evolution to take a hand. The analogy that I sometimes use is between separated islands, that as is well known, islands in the Mediterranean for example, have endemic species which are peculiar to those islands, the result of evolutionary changes since the islands were separated. Nobody I think could possibly suppose that in the name of conservation, one would translocate the endemic plants of say Karpathos to the island of Rhodes or vice versa. I am not suggesting that there is the same degree of difference between isolated woods, but the difference is probably there and I would hesitate before saying that it should be disregarded.

Chris Baines: Can I just say that it is not really an issue in terms of water supply - you will be familiar with the discussion that crops up every time there is a drought that what we need is a water grid because there is lots of surplus water in the North West of the country and you are all living in a virtual desert down here. And what that means, and that may very well be one of the sub plots in the British Waterways shift, is that people start to talk about transferring from catchment to catchment, using the canal network to move water from one catchment to another. When I was working in Yorkshire Water back in the 90s, they actually built the pipe from the Tees Valley where you have got a huge reservoir that was built to supply an industrial lower valley, which is now no longer industrial, to transfer the water over into the Yorkshire catchments because there was a drought problem in Bradford and Huddersfield. It started to rain almost the week that the pipe was completed, it was quite extraordinary, they spent several millions putting the pipe in, and never ever turned it on! But there was serious concern then about some of the pathogens in the fish populations in the Tees catchment that would be transferred into the Yorkshire catchment system. So you could very well find that you here in Suffolk and in Essex, are the very reason why that kind of transfer is triggered. It will be your drought stress and your failure to create those aquifer recharge wetlands that we were talking about this morning that would drive the pipelines of the canal systems that will bring the pathogens across the country.

Richard Mabey: I think that one of the things that might be overlooked here is the tremendous genetic variability of wild tree populations. And it is not just to resist disease but the ability to cope with drought. Where I used to live in the Chilterns, it was really quite conspicuous the way you had a planted beech wood, very often from a single genetic source with trees more or less identical, growing next to a common with genetically diverse beech population. The enormous difference is in the ability of the trees to survive drought. The planted beech monocultures were very vulnerable, but inside the wild population you always found trees that were very resistant. An argument for connecting woodlands is that the genetic variability from one part of the wood which includes resistance to climatic extremes and disease pathogens, can actually infiltrate faster.

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Question: Why conserve biodiversity? Why do we need it? And how do we make other people share our concerns?

Richard Mabey: In its extreme anthropocentrism I would hope that we are beginning to move into it. Scientists have started calling the era we live in the ‘anthropocene’, the era in which all mechanisms relating to life processes are influenced most profoundly by human beings. This doesn’t exclude our thinking that all the other organisms on the planet also have a right to live here.

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