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Last updated 20 December  2014

WILDLAND REPORTS and PRESENTATIONS

CHANGE PROCESSES AT SCALE – ARE THEY NATURAL? November 2014
I covered the Oostvaardesplassen in Week 9 of the wilderness environments course, using it as an example of a landscape undergoing a process of change. Usually, I highlight Frans Vera’s role in the OVP, and his crazy theory about open landscapes and woodland regeneration, but instead I concentrated on the reasons for the mortality of the enclosed herbivores, which since 2005 has been a year on year death of around 1,000 animals due to starvation, as the fencing around OVP prevents them from migrating to find new food sources. OVP started with 100 animals introduced between 1986-1992, but has bred its way to nearly 4,000 herbivores now, eating the life out of the land. Mortality is greatest during the winter months, the extensive bark chewing and death of what trees there were, indicating that the capacity of the land has been over reached. It makes me really angry that Vera shrugs this off – but about 8,000 animals have died since 2005, twice the current population, and it hasn’t been due to old age. The students had no difficulty identifying the ecological illiteracy and the lack of natural control mechanisms in the absence of a top carnivore. The lessons from OVP, and the increasing prevalence of cattle grazing throughout Ennerdale Valley, are why we have decided that Ennerdale is no longer suitable for the course field-trip, especially when the ecological restoration occurring over the last ten years at the nearby Hardknott Forest is creating a band of woodland that follows the Duddon River from moorland all the way down to sea level. (6Mb)

CARRIFRAN WILDWOOD – ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION IN THE MOFFAT HILLS,  November 2014
The Carrifran Wildwood, a re-vegetation of a whole valley in the Moffat Hills, is the fieldtrip next year for the wilderness environments course. I visited the valley again in early September, and it was good to see the undoubted progress in tree growth since I was last there in 2008. A number of things stood out – the opportunity to see roseroot in the valley without having to swing off a rope (it is often only found in rock crevices and inaccessible ledges); we were also shown the small native woodland “refuges” of Henderland and Craigdilly SSSI outside the valley, plus the fragment behind a sheep anti-suicide fence above the burn in Gameshope valley, all sources of inspiration for Carrifran. Refuges were pretty much a theme of the day, since there were habitat refuges in the valley associated with its geology – the plants in rock crevices, the tall herb communities on inaccessible ledges and gullies, and the plants on high level screes, all escaping the centuries of sheep grazing. The remnant tree populations in the valley in these refuges, and especially clinging to the slopes above Carrifran Burn, have been used for seed collecting and raising of 450,000 trees that have been planted there. (1.3Mb)

YORKSHIRE DALES – CLASSIFICATION OF PROTECTED AREAS INTO IUCN MANAGEMENT CATEGORIES, November 2014
In Week 8, the wilderness environments course looked at wildland and ecological restoration in Britain. A range of protected area types exist in Britain, often being nested together. This talk looks at a range of protected areas in the Yorkshire Dales around Ingleborough Hill, their ownership, designation type, whether they are open access, and whether there area payments on the land under an agri-environment scheme, and what that tell us about their management and how wild they are. The examples are four Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserves, South House Moor Re-wilding Project, Scar Close, Ling Gill and Colt Park Wood of Natural England, and Great Douk Cave. The reserves are classified into IUCN Categories of management based on the absence or presence of grazing livestock. (2.5Mb)

ECOLOGICAL VALUES OF WILDERNESS: HOW DID WE GET HERE – WHERE ARE WE GOING? October 2014
I get to do the ecology bit on the wilderness environments course in Week 3. It’s a big topic for just two hours, but it is the only chance put across the biophysical reality of wilderness, and why humans as the exceptional species are a threat to that. The rise in human population and the relative exploitability of habitats is tied to the extent of land transformation over the millennia since the last ice age. Areas of lowest human impact are where there is remaining wildness. Key to the loss of wilderness is the eradication of large carnivores as well habitat fragmentation, leaving a contemporary overlap of large carnivore ranges skewed to the east in Europe. The consequence of predator removal, the loss of trophic cascades, is illustrated through the Green World Hypothesis, with examples from Venezuela and Macquarie Island. The Chernobyl exclusion zone shows what happen if humans are removed. Wolves are moving west in Europe, the future secondary wilderness in ex-military training grounds in Germany accompanied by the return of the wolf. Denmark and the Netherlands have also accepted the inevitable return of wolf. The second half is about the meaning of wild, naturalness and native in landscapes, what exemplifies them, and what the wild ones have in common. The reason why woodland often provides the wildest experience is because the dominant natural vegetation of England would be woodland, the current deciduous woodland cover being a tenth, and we have none of our top predators. Given the chance of an undiscovered island, what would be do? (3.5Mb)

RENATURING UPLAND VEGETATION AND HYDROLOGY – EXCLUDING LIVESTOCK GRAZING, November 2013
There is a trend in Cumbria and North Yorkshire of fencing off areas of registered common land in the uplands to exclude grazing in pursuit of various gains in biodiversity, woodland coverage and water quality. I follow this by inspecting the decisions on the Planning Inspectorate website, since fencing requires application for permission under s38 of the Commons Act 2006. In Week 9 of the wilderness environments course, I coupled an overview of this with details from a report from the Wild Trout Trust on the potential of renaturing an upland stretch of the River Cover in Coverdale, North Yorks., to make it better habitat for fish. This led into a section by Richard Hart, one of the students, on his project looking at the hydrology of the River Liza that flows down the Ennerdale Valley in Cumbria. The Ennerdale Valley has been the location for the field trip of this course, but the increasing prevalence of cattle grazing throughout the valley on the back of agri-environment funding was causing us to question whether it was any longer a suitable study area. To finish, I gave a brief description of the natural regeneration of woodland at Hardknott Forest over the last ten years, as areas of plantation trees had been harvested. The planting of the Grassguards Native Woodland on the fellside south of Hardknott links in this regeneration to a band of ancient woodland that follows the Duddon River all the way down to sea level. (3.9Mb)

ECOLOGICAL VALUES OF EUROPE’S WILDERNESS, November 2013
This was a rather expansive talk that I gave during Week 7 of the wilderness environments course. It began by comparing the divergent paths for wild land in the 19th and 20th century between the aesthetic approach of America where wild land was viewed as a source of inspiration and recreational activity, and the scientific approach in Europe to the restoration and the preservation of unique assemblages of species. Forests are the history of protected nature in Europe, with protection forests being a stabilising factor against natural hazards, and undisturbed forest as a metaphor for wilderness in Europe. Many ecological concepts were defined in Europe, and presaged the emergence of the protected area in Europe such as the Lagodehki State Nature Reserve, Georgia, and the Swiss National Park. These protected areas contain system directing mammalian species, the large carnivores acting as conservation surrogates, and being co-located in eastern Europe, as well as returning to Chernobyl. Restoring wilderness from an ecological perspective is happening in Denmark and Germany with the return of the wolf. (3.5Mb)

EUROPEAN WILDERNESS AS REVEALED BY STRICT PROTECTION IN NATURE CONSERVATION AND FOREST LEGISLATION, October 2013
I gave this talk on 10 October during the Science Section of the World Wilderness Congress in Salamanca. The legislation of many countries across Europe for nature conservation and for forests contains protected area types of reserve and National Park that embody restrictions and prohibitions on use that describe a strict protection that is characteristic of wilderness areas. This talk reviewed strictly protected area types in European national legislation, and how the protected areas designated through the legislation are classified under the IUCN categories of protected areas. Data from the CDDA suggests that these strictly protected areas constitute about 0.8% of Europe. While these protected areas may be considered Europe’s wilderness, it should not be overlooked that forested areas across Europe also have restrictions on their use where they contribute to landscape protection or water quality. A review of protective forests across Europe shows that more than 20 percent of Europe’s forests are reported to fulfil protective functions for soil, water and other ecosystem services, as well as to protect infrastructure. The Netherlands and the UK are the two countries in Europe that don’t have a clue about strict protection and protection of natural conditions. (1.5Mb)

THE DEFINITION OF WILDERNESS: PUSHING TRUE WILDERNESS INTO THE FRONTLINE!, October 2013
I gave this talk on 9 October during a session of PAN Parks European Wilderness Days at the World Wilderness Congress in Salamanca. It dealt with the two themes that “Rewilding” Europe had pushed into the “Vision for Europe” of the Congress, about “wildlife comeback” and the “new paradigm”. I thoroughly dissected their warped ideology of thinking that large carnivores are not the system directing species of trophic cascades - they and their allies always seek to minimize the influence that carnivores have on the behaviour and impact of herbivores. The wildlife comeback in Europe owed nothing to "Rewilding" Europe or its ideology. When they say theirs is the "new paradigm", it shows their knowledge of the history of protected areas in Europe is as bad as their eco-illiteracy. It was the withdrawal of human influence on landscapes that has been the key factor, as is demonstrated by 100 years of strict protection in places like the Swiss National Park, or the Lagodekhi State Nature Reserve in Georgia, a fact that was recognised by Harvey Hall, an American who travelled Europe in 1928, comparing the European approach to National Parks and reserves to that in America. This meant no hunting, no logging, and NO grazing - the original paradigm, and which Hall observed was needed in Europe because, unlike America, there were no large areas of unmodified nature left here. Thus there had to be a long period of strict protection to restore what he called the natural condition. (2Mb)

WILD OR NATURAL - THE CHALLENGES EUROPE FACES IN SETTING ASIDE WILDERNESS, May 2013
I was asked to give one of the opening talks at a wilderness conference in Co Mayo, Ireland, on 15 May 2013. The conference was a crowning of the audacious plan to develop Nephin Forest as a prototype Irish wilderness. I walked the plantation forest the year before with Bill Murphy, Head of Recreation at Coillte, and the task he gave me was to “throw in a grenade” amongst the conference delegates, to get them thinking. I took the approach of teasing out the meanings of wild, natural and native. I then led the audience through some places I have visited over the years, judging each one for those three characteristics. I also conveyed the two factors that had been significant in overcoming my scepticism about a plantation forest becoming a secondary wilderness. All of the native woodlands I had walked in Ireland had a common factor of astonishing woodland interiors, showing evidence of a strong hyper-oceanic influence that results in ground layers lush with ferns, woodrush, Irish ivy etc. The trunks and branches of the trees, and every rock, had a thick clothing of mosses, liverworts and lichens, including the lungwort lichen. I had also walked Guagán Barra Forest Park, a plantation that completely fills an enclosed high sided valley bowl of old red sandstone walls, and where Coillte have let the plantation trees grow on, while there is native tree regeneration at the upper margins. I coupled these two factors with the fact that it was a landscape scale forest of over 40sqkm, that it encompasses bogs, lakes and rivers, and that there is evidence throughout of windthrow as well as both native and non-native tree regeneration, so that all the elements for a restoring wilderness exist. (2Mb)

WILDERNESS AND NATURA 2000, March 2013
Week 6 of the Wilderness Environments course saw Steve lay out the events in Europe since the resolution in the European Parliament in February 2009. My task in the second half of the class was to critique the ability of the Natura 2000 system to protect wilderness. To set it up, I reviewed the timeline of the loss of wilderness since the last glaciation due to human modification, showing how the transformation to used land was much earlier in Europe, central Africa and Asia than elsewhere, and that the rate of global transformation took off from around 1700 when there was also an explosion in the rate of population increase. The wilderness that is left in Europe is primarily Boreal and temperate forest. In exploring how wilderness is protected in Europe now, I contrasted national legislation for protected areas with the EU legislation. Wilderness is not explicit in the Natura 2000 system. However, I pointed to an interpretation of the Natura 2000 system for wilderness based on the strict protection of large carnivores. (1.3Mb)

A REVIEW OF NATURALISTIC GRAZING VERSUS NATURAL PROCESSES, September 2012
This was a presentation at the Europe’s Wilderness Days meeting in Nauvo-Nagu in Finland on 28 September 2012. It shows how conservation grazing with livestock in England has, since the publication of Frans Vera's theories on forests, become entitled naturalistic grazing that in turn is now associated with rewilding. I show that this is driven by agri-environment subsidy and that unfortunately, areas of the Public Forest Estate have become the playground for Vera-like experiments in wood pasture creation. I show that Vera's theories are totally unsupported in the literature, and a fundamental flaw is the absence of carnivores in influencing herbivore behaviour. The ecological restoration that has occurred on Scar Close since grazing was fenced out, shows how natural processes operate. (3Mb)

MAPPING WILDERNESS IN EUROPE AND BEYOND, September 2012
A shared presentation with Steve Carver, during the symposium on Wilderness at the edge of survival in Europe, given at the 3rd European Congress of Conservation Biology in Glasgow on 1 September 2012. It’s a presentation about the value of mapping wildland. It has wilderness mapping at global and European scale, and wildland mapping in the Scottish national parks. It shows the Wilderness Quality Index (WQI) maps that we developed for Europe, and how the distribution of large carnivores in Europe coincides with the top areas of WQI. My section starts with Mapping frontiers, how the use of mapping identifies trans-boundary networks of corridors for wildlife, and how the co-location of carnivores with other species of conservation interest in the Carpathian Mountains is an opportunity mapping for the establishment of new protected areas. (3Mb)

SPIRIT OF WILD LAND - a timeline in words and pictures, January 2012
A presentation to Leeds University Geography students on Week 4 of their 10-week Wilderness Environments course. The theme for that week was Recreational Use of Wildland. I wanted to get across the immense passion in America during the 19th century for wildland as a publicly owned experience: from Catlin and his call for a “nations park”; Thoreau and his “word for nature”; the “discovery” and photographing of Yosemite Valley; the grant of Yosemite into the protection of the State of California, and the Preliminary Report by Olmstead as one of the first Commissioners appointed to manage the grant of the Yosemite Valley. I contrasted this with the Epping Forest Act, considered to be one of the earliest examples in Britain of an attempt to preserve an open space for public use, but which ultimately was about shackling that space to agriculture. I followed this with the lost opportunities of Dove Dale and Glen Coe (PDF 700kb)

THE PROTECTION OF WILD LAND IN SCOTLAND, September 2011
The John Muir Trust had used the Petition system of the Scottish Parliament to open up discussion on giving greater protection to wildland in Scotland. In support of this, JMT commissioned an options paper to identify arguments for bringing together both biodiversity and landscape in the protection of wild land in Scotland – to show that there is advantage in looking at these two things jointly. This is a departure from the view that wild land in Scotland is primarily about wider landscape and cultural values, historically driven by recreational values, and protected solely by controlling physical development. The options paper identifies a biophysical basis for identifying wildness in Scotland, and the current positive drivers that enhance that wildness. Options are given as to how to protect wildland areas, showing community and social benefits where applicable (1.5Mb)

DOES IT HAVE (FOUR) LEGS?  - The Dutch Experience of Nature Development, March 2011
A presentation to Geography students at Leeds University on Week 9 of their 10-week Wilderness Environments course. The theme for that week was Re-wilding the Lowlands. The first lecture looked at, amongst other things, the Oostvaardersplassen, a high profile nature reserve in the Netherlands that has large populations of free-ranging herbivores. The reserve is an exemplar of the Dutch approach of nature development, a new paradigm of directed management for nature in a country heavily modified by agriculture. There is often an illogic at its centre, as instanced by the felling of trees in the re-instatement of the shifting sands of National Park Drents-Friese Wold. The large carnivores are absent in Oostvaardersplassen, this predator free state an anomaly in the trophic cascades of wild nature. I contrasted this with the return of the gray wolf to Yellowstone National Park, and the consequent transformations of the native vegetation. The large carnivores are returning in continental Europe, and moving ever westward (PDF 2.6Mb)

REVIEW OF STATUS AND CONSERVATION OF WILD LAND IN EUROPE, November 2010
This report was commissioned by the Scottish Government in response to the Resolution on Wilderness passed by the European Parliament in February 2009. It provides the first fully comprehensive review of the status and conservation of wildland in Europe by mapping its extent and location, and identifying the means of protection. The status of wild land in Scotland is then assessed within a European context. A set of case studies is presented that are biophysical and developmental analogues of selected Scottish wildlands found in Europe to draw out comparisons and similarities with continental contexts and systems of management, and a series of key opportunities is given for developing future policy and action on wildland in Scotland (PDF 4.6Mb)

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS LINKED TO WILDERNESS AREAS, September 2010
I was invited by PAN Parks to give a talk at their Europe’s Wilderness Days meeting in Borjomi, Georgia. These meetings are their annual get together of PAN Parks members, as well as people from national parks that are prospective members. All PAN Parks have a core wilderness area, and so it was great to be amongst people with a strong enthusiasm for wildland. I was asked to talk about our experiences with the study for the Scottish Government, and the research questions that had emerged from the report. I also explained why the Wildland Research Institute is interested in wilderness. I finished by introducing the research group that had been brought together by PAN Parks to bid for research funding from the EC Seventh Framework Program (PDF 1Mb)

REVIEW OF STATUS AND CONSERVATION OF WILD LAND IN EUROPE for the Scottish Government, May 2010
I gave this presentation at a UNESCO-sponsored conference on Scotland's Wild Landscapes – New Ways Forward at SNH’s Battleby Centre, near Perth. It contained the initial findings of my work on the Scottish Government commissioned review on the status and conservation of wild land in Europe. I made the case for wildland being recognised by countries in Europe through the IUCN system of protected areas, and I described the various ways that the protected area systems were implemented. There was astonishment among some in the audience that the UK has no protected areas in the IUCN categories that protect wildland. The final report is shown above (PDF 1.7Mb)

ZONES AND CONNECTIVITY – lessons from wild area networks from around the world, November 2006
I gave this talk to a meeting of the Leeds Permaculture group. It showed that Mollison, the originator of Permaculture, had tied our survival to the continuing existence of wilderness. It was was an opportunity to show the parallels between the concept of zoning for land use in Permaculture that includes wilderness, with the zoning that is used in wild area networks in Canada, Australia, America, Romania, and in the the No Take Zone around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel. Land use zoning at a large scale is used to plan resource protection and management in British Columbia, building the links between Protected Areas so that migration is enabled. This connectivity between protected areas is the basis of the continental megalinkages of the Wildlands Network Design of cores and connectivity in North America, and is also seen in the buffers and linkages between protected areas in South Australia. A proposal for cores and corridors across Britain is given in finer scale through examples of green infrastructure in the Soar Valley and in SE Leeds (PowerPoint presentation 2.4Mb)

SELF-WILLED LAND - an expression of a future-natural state for British landscapes , February 2006 
A presentation to 3rd year Geography students at Leeds University, on Week 3 of their 10-week Wilderness Environments course. From the previous week, it was clear the students were unsure of what wilderness really means. Thus I provided a contrast to the backward conceptual understanding of wilderness in the UK, with the reality of beauty and richness observable in self-willed land just about anywhere in the world. This led into Permaculture and the position wilderness commands in its land ethic, and how its zoning approach to land use is also seen in many protected area systems such as the national parks in Canada, and in wilderness systems in America and Europe. I ended with a look at future-natural as the potential for landscapes in Britain (PowerPoint presentation 1,400kb)

WILDLAND GAZETTEER, October 2005
The rewilding of Britain's landscapes could take many different trajectories, based on the practicalities of examples that exist at present. The Wildland Network had a project to develop a Wildland Gazatteer to provide those examples as inspiration and advice. To introduce the project, I gave a presentation at the second WN meeting, held at Newton Rigg in Cumbria. A key question for compiling the gazatteer is what characterises a rewilding project. A simple definition is land undergoing transition to a future natural state. (PowerPoint presentation 700kb)