Welcome! This blogspot gives you the chance to have your say as part of the 5 Year Review of the Sefton Coast Woodlands Forest Plan. To aid this process, please keep all discussion focused on the 5 Year Review. Any inappropriate or abusive posts will be removed.
Site moderator: admin@merseyforest.org.uk
Activities:
Interpretation boards and signs have been installed and maintained at Formby Point, Sefton Council, National Nature Reserve and Freshfield Dune Heath sites.
Information packs and leaflets have been developed and distributed for Freshfield Dune Heath, Formby Golf Club and Sefton Council woodlands.
Lancashire Wildlife Trust has supported and encouraged student projects.
The National Trust, Sefton Council, St Lukes Church and National Nature Reserve have supported education establishment visits.
Lancashire Wildlife Trust, The National Trust and Sefton Council have provided regular guided walks in the woodland areas.
There has been a joint development of a new squirrel trail on Lifeboat Road.
A question for you:
The Plan did not specify this objective in the first instance, but this review has highlighted that a number of the landowners are very actively involved in education about all aspects of the woodlands. The objective and activities have been inserted – do you feel that this adequately reflects the range of work undertaken across the Sefton Coast?
5 comments:
The woodlands in question are on sand dunes. They cause serious direct and indirect damage to the conservation status of the dune system - the dunes are of nature conservation importance at all levels, from local to international.
The red squirrels present in the dune woodlands are clearly of nature conservation importance; this factor however does send seriously conflicting messages to people about the management of the dunes.
Restoration of open dunes from previous pine plantations is extremely improtant for dune conservation - not just for the area previously covered by pines, but for the integrity of the whole dune system, as both dune dynamics and hydrology are affected. Serious disruption to this work, and significant financial costs, have been precipitated as a result of people not understanding these issues.
It is vital that all education visits to the dune system firstly and primarily focus on understanding the dune system, NOT the pine woodlands that are not natural and are damaging to the dunes.
The fact that so many interpretative leaflets and boards that are the first point of information for visitors to the dunes are 'foregrounded' by red squirrels (NOT A DUNE SPECIES) is in my view a serious strategic mistake.
Thus the woodland plan should be cognissant of the primary nature conservation value of the dune system and not promote educational policy that may damage the central meesage of the importance of the dunes.
These comments continue to raise some important issues for landowners in the Sefton area. It is a very particular perspective that did in fact form part of the debate that the wider society had in 2002 while the Forest Plan was being formulated. We will need to revisit the discussion on a regular basis to re-evaluate priorities of the different over-arching objectives of the Forest Plan. There will be opportunities in 2012, when the landowners return to the higher level objectives to re-balance the priorities in the light of 10 years of experience. However, as for the present, this review is the time to look at the Forest Plan, its short term objectives and achievements against those objectives.
As this has been posted under the education objective, there is one point that needs to be picked up and that is to say that an extensive open dune system is also, largely, a managed phenomenon, a product of a particular historical land-management style, no less important or beautiful for that, but one that cannot promoted as being more or less ‘natural’ than any other managed ecosystem.
I am delighted to see the comments on the commitment to ongoing and regular review of policy - and also the need for understanding of cultural and historical influences on the current dune landscape.
I hope, however, that the educational message about the significance of the dune landscape is not lost. Young people should not go away without this view. I am concerned for the future if they are taught by inference that the what is important about the Sefton Coast is woodland.
And finally - I would very much contest the team's comment that an open dune system cannot be promoted as being more or less ‘natural’ than any other managed ecosystem. Although we do not know what natural is/was, we can be absolutely confident that it is/was not plantation pine woodland of non-native species ... and we can be pretty confident that it would have been dynamic and much of it was composed of the specialist species now found on open dunes. I would be very interested to know what 'particular historical land-management style' is being refered to here, as there have been many varied human influences on the dune landscape. Extensive stock grazing and warrening are two such activities. Marram planting was another. Evidence from a number of dune systems indicates the over-riding inlfuence of physcial factors such as variations in climate and hydrology. It is assertions such as yours that I have quoted above that really concern me ... and these concerns are short term and urgent in my view.
It is not the Team’s intention to come back on every comment, but there are issues that need responding to in the latest posting.
It is important to remember that the Forest Plan is about the woodlands, because it is about managing that particular resource. This means that it has a particular perspective, not to the exclusion of all else, but it is therefore not the place to deal with the complexity of managing the dune system across the whole coast. The up-coming Conservation Strategy will play that role.
Education relating to the Forest Plan is only a tiny part of all the education activities that go on along the coast. The activities being talked about in the Plan are primarily about the woodlands and red squirrel conservation and are therefore not about coastal management and open dune ecology, this is taken care of elsewhere. If the ONLY education on the coast were about the red squirrel, there would be a major point for concern, but as this is NOT the case, the issue is therefore one of balance. This point (about balance) will be taken into the review process and considered by the land owners.
The comment about ‘natural’ is interesting. It seems clear that both the blogger and ‘Team’ are saying the same thing! At no stage has it been said or written that pine woodland in England or in Sefton is natural and any suggestion otherwise is wrong. The point about ‘natural’ is precisely that the current nature of the dunes is largely a product of human intervention (stock grazing, rabbit warrens) and that we are therefore uncertain what a ‘natural’ dynamic dune system on the Sefton Coast would have looked like. That is not a qualitative statement, merely fact and has no bearing on the importance that society attaches to the open dune species and landscape. It has to be made very clear that the Forest Plan, The Mersey Forest Team and the land owners all consider the open dune species and ecology to be very important and any suggestion otherwise is a misinterpretation of their position.
I agree to a point with the issues raised by the first respondent. There is the potential for mixed messages to be given and for people to come away thinking that the pinewoods are natural and of high biodiversity. Dune succession discusses how scrub and native woodland may form part of the system. We have examples of native woodland in slacks (Alder) and developing from scrub. I wonder how many students go away thinking that the pinewoods are a natural part of succession. Education programmes should be clear about explaining that these are plantations -then it is OK to discuss how the plantations affect the landscape, their value for amenity and wildlife, their history etc. It would be useful to use two images to explain this: one an early nineteenth Century view showing the farms, farm woods, hedges and scrub and the other showing how the plantations have changed the landscape. This would give a good indication of how the plantations developed through the work of the landowners.
Post a Comment