Sheila George, our land use policy officer, spent a week at our RSPB Scotland Forsinard Flows reserve. In this blog Sheila fills us in on how her time was spent and on the amazing landscape that makes up the reserve.
Forsinard Flows: where size matters
I’m recently back from a fantastic week of volunteering at Forsinard Flows. If you haven’t been, here are a few reasons to get up there:
It’s all about scale at Forsinard Flows, the biggest RSPB reserve in the UK. It sits within the Flow Country, which gets its name from “flow” or “floe” meaning wet and is another word for blanket bog. Blanket bog can only form under the right climatic conditions, requiring a cool, oceanic climate with heavy rainfall – which makes Scotland the perfect place to find it. The Flows holds the largest continuous area of blanket bog habitat in Europe, almost 5% of the global blanket bog resource! The habitat supports almost half of the UK’s breeding population of common scoters and significant breeding populations of golden eagles, short-eared owls, merlins, golden plovers, dunlins, greenshanks, red throated divers, wood sandpipers, wigeons and black-throated divers. Red deer, mountain hares, lizards, amphibians, insect-eating sundew plants and a host of invertebrates thrive here. It is also the site of the largest landscape-scale tree removal and blanket bog restoration project in the UK.
Hummock of peat-forming Sphagnum mosses
Standing in the middle of the landscape, it’s difficult to process its vastness. It isn’t until you get down to root around and take in the little things that you can truly appreciate how special the plant species that make up this habitat really are. Sphagnum mosses form a carpet across the ground, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and locking it up within their cells. When they die, the low oxygen conditions of the waterlogged soil prevents the plant matter from fully decomposing. As a result, dead Sphagnum are laid down in layers and form peat. This process means that the carbon captured by the plants is locked up and stored within peat. After thousands of years of peat formation, the blankets bogs of the Flow Country hold six times more carbon than all of the forests in the UK combined!
The Flows is a vast carbon store and, if Scotland is to meet its ambitious climate targets, it is vitally important that the habitat is kept in a healthy state so that carbon stays locked in the ground. However, this habitat has been underappreciated in the past. Historical tax breaks and subsidies in the 1970s and 1980s led to large-scale drainage and planting of the Flow Country with non-native conifer plantation. This has damaged large areas of blanket bog. When peatlands are damaged and dried out, carbon is released into the atmosphere and the water, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, impacting drinking water quality and fish spawning. At the same time, the vegetation assemblages change in response to drier conditions and the habitat becomes less suitable for the species they once supported. A decrease in Sphagnum mosses in favour of hardier grasses and scrub means that less carbon is being absorbed from the atmosphere, so there is a double carbon cost of damaged peatlands.
Commercial forestry planted on blanket bog
Thankfully in recent years understanding has grown of the important role blanket bogs can play in climate change adaptation and mitigation, and supporting biodiversity. A network of Sites of Special Scientific Interest were designated and tax breaks for forestry planting were removed in 1988. RSPB Scotland purchased Forsinard Estate in 1994, followed by subsequent blocks, creating the Forsinard Flows nature reserve. Through successive European and national grants, bit by bit trees are being removed and drains blocked. Sphagnum mosses and other bog plants are already making a comeback on areas where trees have been removed.
Blocking drains raises the water level, rewetting the bog so that Sphagnum mosses can recolonise
Current funding through the Peatland Partnership Flows to the Future Project has led to the building of a new field station, providing a growing research hub for the study of peatlands, offering laboratory and education facilities, as well as accommodation for volunteers and students. This means that the reserve can offer working holidays, which is your opportunity to get hands on with protecting this amazing landscape. We blocked drains, did vegetation monitoring, went hunting for dipwells (which are used to measure water levels within the bog) and removed the saplings which sprout up on restored bog, having seeded from felled or neighbouring forestry. Restoring and conserving such a large area is resource-intensive so volunteers can really help staff with practical conservation activity. As a reward, you get to stay in the swanky new field centre and watch red deer graze outside the window.
Natural pool system from viewing platform
If losing your wellies in a bog isn’t your thing, the new viewing platform will let you get a panoramic view of the landscape and keep your feet (fairly) dry. Find out more about the Flows to the Future Project here.