Biodiversity and Upland Management

Introduction 2 In this booklet, we summarise some of the research from the Scottish Government’s Strategic Research Programme on wildlife and biodiversity and how these interact with management, with particular emphasis on the uplands which cover two thirds of Scotland’s land area. Whilst they are important for wildlife, nature conservation and recreation, they are also managed for livestock, woodland, red grouse shooting and deer stalking. In recognition of these multiple objectives a number of policies such as Scotland’s Land Use Strategy ( Getting the Best From Our Land , 2011) and the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy ( 2020 Challenge for Scotland’s Biodiversity , 2013) aim to foster sustainable environmental management to safeguard the biodiversity and the benefits they provide to society. We describe some of the work recently undertaken to support the management of key upland species and components of biodiversity. We show in Chapter 1 how diversity of management can help to increase the diversity of upland birds at a landscape scale. Developing effective monitoring is important for Adaptive Management and in support of the ‘ Wildcat Conservation Action Plan ’, and we used our spatial analysis skills to assess candidate priority areas and to inform a reliable monitoring framework (Chapter 2). We show in Chapter 3 how standardising record keeping can improve our ability to detect changes in red deer body mass and reproduction to support of the priorities for sustainable deer management identified in ‘Wild Deer: A National Approach 2014 Review’ . Making use of good quality data is crucial if we are to manage conflicts such as those over deer management and public access (Chapter 4) and developing effective monitoring of mountain hares (Chapter 5) is essential as part of Scotland’s obligation to sustainably manage this iconic, Annex V species. The practice of muirburn is an important wildlife management tool and our results demonstrate that vegetation recovery on wet heaths and blanket bogs is slow (Chapter 6). Technological advances in remote wildlife monitoring such as camera traps is an increasingly valuable way to engage communities with wildlife (Chapter 7). Where an environment provides a wide range of ecosystem services , as exemplified by the uplands, maintaining local livelihoods as well as wider public benefits remains a challenge (Chapter 8). Work on understanding long-term patterns in semi-natural habitats has detected widespread homogenisation, decreasing plant diversity and increasing graminoid cover in several habitats across Europe, attributable to human activities and environmental change (Chapter 9). Montane habitats, including internationally important Racomitrium heath, show significant impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition on key ecosystem processes (Chapter 10). Climate- driven changes in upland habitats may require intervention to conserve the less mobile species, for example by translocation to other areas, which provides significant methodological challenges (Chapter 11). Mitigating climate change via woodland expansion also needs to consider wider impacts such as the finding that the abundance of ticks is higher in woodlands (Chapter 12). The restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem processes through re-wilding must consider a broad range of impacts, be they benefits or costs, to biodiversity and ecosystem processes as demonstrated in the beaver reintroduction trial (Chapter 13), and other high profile initiatives such as the Lynx reintroduction (Chapter 14). Similarly, supporting scavenger species by, for example, carcass placement for the golden eagle also influences other aspects of the food web and wider ecosystem processes (Chapter 15) and scavenger activity is strongly influenced by the presence or absence of predator control (Chapter 16). We need to continue working with relevant stakeholders to identify the upcoming issues and the appropriate monitoring to understand how the uplands respond to drivers of change so that sustainable management options can continue to be developed, tested and applied. Justin Irvine justin.irvine@hutton.ac.uk