Moors for the Future

A Peak District initiative brings all aspects of upland management together. 

01/12/2008

Moors for the Future held an excellent two day conference in the Peak District National Park last month. It included a review of the progress of several moorland studies and a lot of conservation work. Delegates were academics, conservation workers, moor owners, farmers and gamekeepers.

There is a lot of developing science about heather burning and how it may or may not contribute to carbon storage on the blanket bogs of upland moors. Much seems to depend on the temperature of the burn and the extent to which it leaves heather charcoal that gets incorporated into the peat, but also important may be the extent to which small cool frequent burns help prevent hot summer wild fires. These wild fires can kill heather plants, burn away the peat and expose it to erosion, leaving areas that may take decades to recover.

Water was also the subject of several talks. The extensive gully erosion that is evident in the Peak District may possibly have been caused by heavy industry pollution in the past. This might have destroyed the ability of the vegetation to repair the areas of blanket bog which occasionally give way when the water table gets very high. Re-vegetation projects and other gully blocking methods seem to be working well in the Peaks. A characteristic, but apparently harmless aspect of upland water supplies is their colouration, and water companies have preferred not to burn heather in some of the catchments they control in an attempt to reduce this colouration at source therefore reducing water treatment costs. However, one study suggested that increasing water colour may simply be a consequence of the big reduction in acid rain there has been over the last two decades.

Naturally too, as one might expect in Britain’s first National Park and location of the famous mass trespass onto the moorland of Kinder Scout in the 1930s, people and people-pressure on upland habitats was a recurrent theme.

Moors for the Future is clearly a highly productive partnership of those in the private and public sector, and, most impressively of all, they use their lottery money highly effectively and manage it all with only a handful of staff.