Forest health is a growing, international concern, with most attention focused on climatic drivers and regions with large tracts of forest cover. By contrast, relatively little is known about how climate change influences forest resilience in landscapes where woodland cover is limited and its composition is strongly influenced by cultural legacies. This gap in knowledge is exacerbated by current evaluation methods, since ecological time-series studies are too short to understand lagged responses and potential disequilibrium between woodland responses, climate shifts and management legacies. These issues are particularly relevant in long-settled landscapes, like Europe. This project will focus on temperate Atlantic woodland communities in NW Scotland to explore how climate change – particularly warmer and abrupt shifts – and human impacts interact to influence woodland health, measured through palaeoecological evidence for diversity, continuity and capacity to recover from perturbations. The project will use high resolution palaeoecological analyses which could include: (1) generating new high-resolution pollen records to improve data coverage in poorly researched areas of woodland, (2) the application of novel palaeoecological techniques such as insect remains (beetles) to determine changes in woodland health (3) quantitative analysis of herbivory using dung fungi to determine the variations in grazing intensity and (4) timeseries analyses of new and existing pollen sequences to assess community continuity and threshold responses through periods of rapid climate shift.
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