On the bright side, heather doesn’t burn particularly hot, just quickly with lots of flame, so the soil should be relatively unscathed in most places.
Without the heather in the way this is the perfect opportunity for a rewilding push like is being seen in Glen Affric.
Deciduous and mixed forests don’t burn with the same ease that heather and coniferous forests do, so if they do rewild it not only restores the natural way of things but makes wildfires less likely to start in the first place.
Are mixed forests what’s supposed to be in this landscape? There’ve been similar problems with moorland peat bogs burning like this in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but I thought those hilltops had kind of always been like that.
Aye. Predominantly Scots Pine, Birch, Aspen, Oak, Juniper, and Rowan.
Not the neat perfect rows and columns of monoculture Spruce or Firs we often see. That’s just a farm, growing timber as fast as possible.
I have no idea about the north of England but certainly the Cairngorms (and the wider Highlands) should be covered in forest if it were left to its natural state for the last few thousand years. Hence the alternative name for Scotland, Caledonia. It comes from the name of the forest, The Caledonian Forest.
The bald heathery mountains and valleys, despite looking beautiful to most are really a symbol of human devastation, biodiversity destruction, and a desert compared with how they should be.
That was my first thought.The peat that causes the fire to keep burning
underground, also makes a good soil for trees and all the understory
needed.
But the heather roots are left behind by the fire and wouldn’t they
need removing first otherwise it would just grow back impeding
the trees?
As long as they plant trees that have had a few years in a nursery first they should be able to coexist despite the roots. Heather roots are quite shallow, tree roots would generally be able to penetrate deeper underneath them. Eventually the canopy of the trees would kill off the heather allowing other plants to come through.
The biggest issue would be keeping the deer numbers low enough to allow the trees to establish and become mature.
That’s one of the reasons why there’s been a push to reintroduce wolves and lynx, to keep deer numbers manageable because decades of hunting and culls haven’t been working.
On the bright side, heather doesn’t burn particularly hot, just quickly with lots of flame, so the soil should be relatively unscathed in most places.
Without the heather in the way this is the perfect opportunity for a rewilding push like is being seen in Glen Affric.
Deciduous and mixed forests don’t burn with the same ease that heather and coniferous forests do, so if they do rewild it not only restores the natural way of things but makes wildfires less likely to start in the first place.
Are mixed forests what’s supposed to be in this landscape? There’ve been similar problems with moorland peat bogs burning like this in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but I thought those hilltops had kind of always been like that.
Aye. Predominantly Scots Pine, Birch, Aspen, Oak, Juniper, and Rowan.
Not the neat perfect rows and columns of monoculture Spruce or Firs we often see. That’s just a farm, growing timber as fast as possible.
I have no idea about the north of England but certainly the Cairngorms (and the wider Highlands) should be covered in forest if it were left to its natural state for the last few thousand years. Hence the alternative name for Scotland, Caledonia. It comes from the name of the forest, The Caledonian Forest.
The bald heathery mountains and valleys, despite looking beautiful to most are really a symbol of human devastation, biodiversity destruction, and a desert compared with how they should be.
https://treesforlife.org.uk/about-us/narrative/
That was my first thought.The peat that causes the fire to keep burning underground, also makes a good soil for trees and all the understory needed. But the heather roots are left behind by the fire and wouldn’t they need removing first otherwise it would just grow back impeding the trees?
As long as they plant trees that have had a few years in a nursery first they should be able to coexist despite the roots. Heather roots are quite shallow, tree roots would generally be able to penetrate deeper underneath them. Eventually the canopy of the trees would kill off the heather allowing other plants to come through.
The biggest issue would be keeping the deer numbers low enough to allow the trees to establish and become mature.
That’s one of the reasons why there’s been a push to reintroduce wolves and lynx, to keep deer numbers manageable because decades of hunting and culls haven’t been working.