Importance of evidence for wild places

David Fleetwood talks about the advantages of accumulating evidence and building a framework to protect wild places.

At our recent Wild Places Gathering held near Loch Lomond, the Trust’s Director of Land and Policy, David Fleetwood highlighted the importance of acquiring evidence and developing a framework to protect wild places. Here is an exerpt from his illustrated speech.

Defining wild places

We define wild places as land where natural processes and natural landscapes take primacy through management.

Following work we are doing with Steve Carver, an animated map of Highland Council area showing the extent of the visual impact of wind infrastructure between 1995 to date speaks to the experiential and physical experience of wild places that we have talked about.

• Watch an animation showing the visual impact of wind farms in Highland Council region from 1995 to date

The animation shows the scale and pace of the change over the 43 years that the Trust has in existence. After a pretty slow burn in the first phases of the map, it grows out of eastern areas of the Cairngorms before suddenly flowing across the map in the last decade or so. Now there are probably only two Munros in Scotland that you can stand on and not see a wind farm from.

Seeking evidence

One of the crucial advantages we have as an organisation in my view is that we manage land.  My portfolio brings together managing land and advocating for wild places. That is a huge advantage because I can seek evidence – such as the number of trees on our properties that show evidence of browsing by deer – I can combine that evidence with thing we think the system needs to change, the legal framework, the financial framework.

^ These graphs illustrate that if you reduce deer numbers the number of trees that show evidence of browsing are declining enabling regeneration of native woodland.

Even with that evidence you have to stand firm on your convictions when you are talking to interested parties. We approach that with a particular agenda. Our responsibility is to clearly explain how and why we are managing that land, and demonstrate that the evidence underpins the outcome for the trees. This is not without discussion and controversy.

We’ve started to steer some of the debate on deer in a different direction. This time around, the programme for Government (the Scottish equivalent of the King’s Speech) had a commitment on government support for deer culls to reduce overall deer populations in Scotland, plus the Natural Environment Bill making its way through parliament at the moment has a strong commitment in it.

Developing a Wild Places Index

We can extend this evidence-based approach more widely in our land management and beyond though the Wild Places Index.

I’m interested in a Wild Places Index that also speaks to our priorities on the land and how to guide and judge some of the intentions we might make.

At Li & Coire Dhorrcail on Knoydart, for example, we have a finite resource in terms of people and money – much of that money thanks to yourselves and other members and supporters. This means we have to make decisions about what we do or what we don’t do: how many deer we can afford to cull; whether we can afford to take fences out; whether the conditions are right to remove those fences.

As well as a framework that helps us understand a UK-wide, and potentially beyond that, level of where those wild places are, what their quality is, where they sit on that continuum, the Wild Places Index is also a very active tool that you can use in how you begin to think about managing these areas. What’s going to deliver the best impact to that wild place? And how can we start to understand the value judgement of different land management choices that we have on different bits of our ground?

Continued evolution and adaption is critical to ensure that what we pass to the next generation is a set of wild places that are in really good fettle.