TFL (Trees For Life)

[Parkino]

I was recently sent an exhortation to vote for this project:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/voteTFL
Does anyone know anything about it?

[PG]

£20,000 of European money for more native forest in Glen Affric. If we don't vote for it the money goes outside the UK

I voted for it; voting closes on Monday.

[Big Jon]

£20,000 of European money for more native forest in Glen Affric. If we don't vote for it the money goes outside the UK

I voted for it; voting closes on Monday.

I voted for them - help them get the money - they have a dream of re-wilding several hundred square miles of Scotland centred on Glen Affric - an awesome dream.

[Parkino]

Voted.

[Parkino]

The Glen Affric Project won.

[Lard]

Great. let's hope they don't start tearing up the forest until after WOC though!

[King Penguin]

They are supposed to be planting, not tearing up.

[Lard]

So, you haven't seen what foresters do when they replace non-native and other species.
It won't be a few grannies with saplings carefully held in their hands. If anyone has seen the work being done at the Great Scottish Forest (Loch Lomond to Callendar) you'll know that the forest will be unusable for orienteers for about 10 years. By which point the FCS Head of Tourism and Recreation (Mr it's-all-about-the-money) is likely to have followed FC England's footsteps and put in a pay-as-you-go barrier at the foot of the valley.

I do paint the bleakest of pictures

[King Penguin]

Fair point.
I have seen the effects of industrial scale coniferous plantings, with big machines digging parallel deep furrows, the visible effects of which remain long after the trees have grown.
I was probably being too optimistic, thinking of (to me) the best caledonian forest remnants I have seen, where trees are more random and sparse in their distribution. If this is what they intend I was hoping that maybe large scale machinery is not the way to obtain the desired effect, but I am probably wrong.

[graeme]

It is quite complicated to get from where we are to the "Natural" state, especially given that nobody knows what that state is.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0387

Glen Affric features pretty low on my list of places needing landscape improvement.

[Glucosamine]

£20k and 20,000 trees won't go very far towards the industrial scale afforestation which created many (?most) of the woods we orienteer in north of the border (I like to think England has more ancient broadleaf, but the FC did their best to change this in the postwar years). The picture at http://treesforlife.org.uk/work/action-plan/ looks very much like somebody's (younger) granny doing the planting. Fencing out the sheep and deer which stop natural regeneration has long been the preferred approach near existing trees, with planting beyond those fringes. From an orienteering viewpoint, the temporary fences seem more likely to be significant than the planting. And in many areas old plantation will fall victim to the harvesting cycle sooner or later.

But the TFL vision is rewilding - and that can mean beavers (more uncrossable marshes?), bears and wolves (less overgrazing by deer and an uncomfortable frisson when relocating?). Other countries seem to manage to share their woods with such creatures - how would/will our risk-averse society treat them?

[mikey]

It is quite complicated to get from where we are to the "Natural" state, especially given that nobody knows what that state is.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0387

27 pages about forests and you didn't manage to mention orienteering even once. Poor effort.

[plain lazy]

It would be nice to imagine that the planting would leave us with a section of open forest similar to the grassy floored area to the high end of Alvie in Speyside, but I suspect it won't be as natural as this... would be nice if they would avoid the industrial scale man-eating extraction tracks made by the machines though.

[Domhnull Mor]

If they're only talking about 20,000 new plantings then they'll hardly need a machine. Along with a few other folk from my club I spent about seven complete days in total over the summer planting 25,000 pine and fir trees to earn cash for the club. Still, it depends how big the plants are when they set them out I suppose.