Scottish rainforests? They existed, though they're now in fragments. But 2.2 million seeds have been collected by rewinding volunteers--to restore them

Ullapool forest. Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.

News to us - though given the available rain, maybe not a surprise - that Scotland is in the midst of the revival of its ancient rainforests.

The first pathway comes from volunteers gathering 2.2 million rate native seeds across Scotland. As Positive.News reports:

The haul is part of a three-year project to grow 1.5m native trees from seed. Many of the species included have unique genetics, and date back to the end of the last Ice Age. Those collected so far include aspen and juniper, from surviving fragments of ancient woodland, including on Skye, the Western Isles and Orkney, and west coast temperate rainforest.

“Seeds are the unassuming beginnings of life, offering us a symbol for hope and the future,” said Roz Birch, coordinator of the Tree Seed Collection Project. “This project is preserving genetically precious and rare species – in turn helping restore native ancient woodland and rainforest, and providing homes for wildlife.” 

From the website of Trees For Life, the organisation leading on this:

Once collected, seeds are processed and tested, then sent to nurseries for sowing and growing on. The young trees will be available for planting at sites across Scotland this autumn – including Woodland Trust Scotland projects to restore Scotland’s rainforest, and Caledonian pinewoods at sites in Argyll and Bute, Lochaber, and the Trossachs.

The Trusts’ Croft Woodland and MOREwoods schemes – which help crofters, smallholders and common grazings associations manage and plant woodlands – will also benefit, as will a 30-year landscape-scale project to establish new native woodlands and restore remnant rainforest in Assynt.

Where natural regeneration is impossible due to a lack of seed sources following deforestation, tree planting is critical for Scotland’s threatened Caledonian forest, of which less than 2% remains. Trees for Life volunteers have now planted more than two million trees at dozens of sites across the Highlands, restoring this unique habitat which supports wildlife including red squirrels, capercaillie and crossbills.

Scotland is currently one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. As members of the Scottish Rewilding Alliance, both Trees for Life and Woodland Trust Scotland are urging people to sign the Rewilding Nation Charter at www.rewild.scot/charter – calling on the Scottish Government to declare Scotland a rewilding nation, committing to nature recovery across 30% of land and sea.

Beaver dam in Scotland (Wikimedia)

Meanwhile, as the Guardian reports, another act of Scottish rewilding - beavers reintroduced to Scotland 15 years ago in Argyll - is generating the conditions for return of more species to “rainforest” areas. Excerpts below:

Beavers reintroduced to a Scottish rainforest 15 years ago may have created the right habitat for the area’s endangered water voles to flourish.

The voles, once abundant in Scotland but now one of the country’s most threatened native animals, could thrive in the “complex boundary between water and land” that beavers have created in Knapdale in Argyll and Bute since their reintroduction there in 2009.

The beavers’ dam-building in the forest has led to the creation of a new habitat along the banks of watercourses, where water voles can dig burrows hidden from predatory mink.

John Taylor, the west region area wildlife manager for Forestry and Land Scotland(FLS), which manages the Knapdale forests, said: “Aside from flooding a few places, the biggest impact we’ve seen from the beavers is creating a new habitat along watercourses. They’ve increased what we call edge habitat: instead of a harsh change from water to land, the edges along the burns and lochs are softened and seasonally flooded.

“This more complex boundary between water and land could be excellent for water voles.”

He added: “One of water voles’ main predators is mink. If you have a very simple burn or loch, it’s easy for mink to find the water voles’ burrows – and the female mink is small enough to get right inside. The Knapdale beavers have blurred the boundaries between water and land, which means more places for water voles to hide and hopefully flourish.”

Pete Creech, a wildlife ranger at the Heart of Argyll Wildlife Organisation, which is working with the FLS in the initial stage of the reintroduction of water voles, said beavers were better engineers than humans when it came to creating wetlands.

“The human creation of wetlands is an extremely costly undertaking and, frankly, we’re not as good at it as beavers.” He added that water voles were themselves “eco-engineers” that could in turn create conditions for wildflowers to flourish.

“Water voles and beavers are complementary species and, in their own way, the voles are as busy eco-engineers as their bigger cousins. Their nibbling of sedges and grasses provides space for a greater diversity of wildflowers, while their burrowing shifts soil nutrients to the surface, increasing their accessibility for plant growth.”

Beavers were hunted to extinction in the 16th century before being reintroduced.

More here. For an overview on Scottish rainforests, see this video from the John Muir Trust