Recent blogs

Working Week

Native woodland establishment – Black Grouse – Argyll

We were back on a windfarm site in Argyll this week checking some aspects of site condition out in advance of undertaking some treatment work for bog restoration. On our travels, we came across the new native woodland we designed as part of a Black Grouse mitigation plan a few years back. It was great to see the trees doing so well, and the landscape really starting to change now…
November 7, 2015
Weekly News

Bog restoration – stump flipping method

We are just in the process of setting up a landscape scale treatment plan for a ‘forest-to-bog’ restoration project. We have been undertaking a whole range of due diligence work including peat slide risk assessment (PSRA) and peat coring to check stratigraphy, alongside checking the level of tree regeneration and the nature of ploughing on the site in advance of specifying treatment works. The cores have been processed in our…
October 20, 2015
Working Week

Riparian Woodland project – deer impacts

We’ve just been finishing off a report quantifying the risks to a riparian planting project posed by deer browsing. The project is aiming to plant native woodland at landscape scale across a number of forests in northern Scotland, in order to help with water quality – it also has relevance to Natural Flood Management. The work involved deer dung density assessments and browsing impact assessments, as well as looking at…
October 11, 2015
Weekly News

Woodland deer population estimate

Back on reporting of last years survey results today. A project in North Mull was the main target, and the results are really interesting. The island has only native Red deer present, and no Roe, albeit it also has a small population of Fallow deer introduced. The survey work was based on the technical methods we developed in the early 2000’s, as described in Forestry Commission FC Bulletin 128 “…
October 8, 2015