My name is Annabel Scott
and I am a fourth year student at Glasgow University studying BSc Environmental
Stewardship. I have joined Lynn at The
Borders Forest Trust this week to give her a hand and see what exactly goes on
at BFT.
The first day consisted
of hiking into the hills of Carrifran Wildwood with Lynn and four volunteers.
We then proceeded to
spray 1000 bamboo cane stakes with bright colours (in order to see them in the
long grass). These canes were placed
randomly on a section of hill (550m altitude) to mark where the new trees will
be planted. Lynn followed on behind us,
spot spraying round each cane with glyphosate herbicide. This is necessary to remove all the current
vegetation that would be competition for the tree seedlings.
Our next three days
were up in Corehead on the Tweedhope site.
Lynn and I began the annual tree beat up surveys, which are important as
they establish roughly how many trees need to be planted in order to bring the
average number of trees up to the level they were at when first planted. This survey required that fifty points were
to be assessed randomly across the hillside, using the Nearest Neighbour Method (Pepper, 1998).
Number of trees, tree
species, number emerging from the tree guard and number browsed or dead were
noted. Additional remarks were made for
trees that were being outcompeted by grass inside their guards and whether or
not kerbing (another form of herbicide) was possibly required in that
area.
We had some serious
climbs at some points in our day:
But it was all worth it
in the end when we got all fifty plots done and the results all typed up. We encountered more spiders than I have ever
seen in one day! However, we saw some
nicer animals too, such as a tiny shrew I rescued from a tree guard, and this
common frog:
Thank you for having me
with you all week Lynn and I am sure I will be back to visit sometime in the
near future!
Annabel Scott (Student
Volunteer)
References:
Pepper, H. (1998). Nearest
Neighbour Method for Quantifying Wildlife Damage to Trees in Woodland,
Edinburgh, Forestry Commission FCPN1.
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