Regenerating Craignish rainforest
Craignish, credit Gordon Gray-Stephens
The Craignish peninsula lies between Loch Craignish and the Sound of Jura in West Argyll. The main settlement is at Ardfern. The peninsula is around five miles long and covers over 2,500 hectares, home to important remnants of Scotland’s rainforest.
A defendable landscape, the area has a rich history and supports many different land uses including commercial forestry, native woodlands, farming, upland grazing, and deer stalking. It is this diversity of interests and landowners involved that makes activity in this area both demanding and potentially so rewarding.
The Regenerating Craignish Rainforest Habitats project will work with communities, landowners, households and land managers to enhance and revive the mosaic of native woodland types, species-rich grassland, wetland habitats and rough grazing land that exist here. Invasive non-native species (INNS) removal and herbivore management are critical for success, with the expansion of Rhododendron ponticum and Sitka spruce being current major threats to the rainforest and other habitats. Working on a peninsula such as Craignish is a unique opportunity in terms of the significant ability to control inward migration of INNS and deer.
Restoring habitat at the scale proposed in combination with several small areas of woodland expansion will increase habitat connectivity and resilience to climate change and protect rare species. With a large number of habitats represented in small but connected patch sizes, both individual species and whole habitats will have space to migrate through the landscape and become more resilient to environmental and anthropogenic threats.
Project Aims
We are just starting on the journey of project development at Craignish, and there are three key activities that need to be completed before we can form a full project plan:
We need to continue to engage with the local community to complete our understanding of landownership across the peninsula, and map this so that we have complete information for the whole area. Engagement with communities and landowners is key to project success.
Drone surveys, ground truthing surveys and herbivore impact assessments are essential to gather accurate data around the extent of INNS cover, particularly rhododendron, deer numbers and grazing pressures, as well as the quality and biodiversity of rainforest fragments and other habitats that exist.
These activities will inform our project budget and plan for delivering large-scale habitat restoration across this landscape.
Once we have this information, we envisage that the Regenerating Craignish Rainforest Habitats project will engage a significant number and range of landowners and land managers over at least five years, to achieve defendable INNS eradication and joined-up herbivore management across the peninsula. This will result in a thriving mosaic of habitats, including significant areas of Scotland’s rainforest.
Craignish, credit Gordon Gray-Stephens
Project partners
Woodland Trust Scotland and Native Woodland Cooperative are leading this ambitious project, working with a wide range of land occupiers to explore the best way to tackle this complicated task. From large private estates to individual households, landownership across the peninsula is highly complex and engagement with all parties will be key to the project’s success. The project will involve twelve major landholdings (>50ha) and the communities of Ardfern and Croabh Haven (approximately 250 households).
Funding Requirements
Our project development phase is just beginning and will take around 6 months, and we need to secure £100,000 to undertake the work needed to shape a full project delivery plan. Once this work is complete, we estimate that it will cost up to £1 million to achieve the project ambitions. We are keen to start as soon as possible.
For more information contact:
Alasdair Firth, Woodland Trust Scotland
