Anger over Scottish forest plan as community fears 'disappearing under a carpet of Sitka'

The team at Tarras Valley Nature Reserve (TVNR), one of Scotland’s largest community buyouts, said it started work this week removing self-seeding Sitka from the site near Langholm, in Dumfries and Galloway, as part of its nature restoration work.

TVNR said it had been given funding as part of an initiative to help control the spread of the spruce variety across the site.

According to the government scheme, the money helps benefit habitats where scrub, in this case Sitka, is invading a sensitive area.

The scheme said: “Scrub can draw water out of the peatlands and wetlands, and intercept rainfall further drying out the habitat. It can also shade out plants in species in rich grasslands.”

TVNR, which was awarded £1 million from the Scottish Government’s Scottish Land Fund for ecological restoration, said surveys “have identified this species [Sitka] as a big risk to the health of our reserve eco-system”.

The buyout group is also working with Scotland’s National Peatland Action Programme to develop a restoration plan for its “vast areas of peatland” on the site.

Next door to the reserve, however, plans are being developed for a predominantly Sitka spruce forest on Warblaw Hill under the Scottish Government’s forestry grant scheme.

The move has angered campaigners, who claim the hill is mainly made up of deep peat, which cannot legally be planted on.

Scottish Woodlands, the agent for the proposal on behalf of the landowner James Jones and Sons Ltd, a sawmilling group in Lockerbie, said “extensive ecological surveys” had been carried out as part of the plans.

A spokesperson for the forestry management company said: “The plan covers an area of 1,050 hectares of which 473 hectares is proposed for woodland creation. The balance of the area would be retained for agricultural use, and this includes all the areas identified as deep peat, following extensive ecological surveys.”

According to documents, the area of planting would be predominantly Sitka (45 per cent), with 19 per cent native broadleaf trees and 18 per cent mixed conifer.

Legislation states all new woodlands must have a 65 per cent per cent single species threshold to encourage diversity of species. Scottish Woodlands also defended the need for Sitka, one of the fastest growing conifers, for future timber security. According to forestry experts, the UK is the second largest importer of timber, second to China.

The industry body said the planting was needed to meet the nation’s tree planting targets, which Scotland regularly fails to reach.

The Save Warblaw Action Group (SWAG) has since formed to protest against the plans.

The group, armed with a petition with more than 1,000 signatures opposed to the woodland scheme, said it would be meeting with Scottish Forestry, the public body responsible for forestry regulation, later this month.

One SWAG member said: “Sitka is self-seeding and appearing on the hillside and on the peat of the TVNR. Teams of volunteers have been battling to remove these trees and to stop the colonisation of the land by this non-native invasive species. 

“You couldn’t make it up. Public funding removing Sitka one side of the valley, and public funding going towards planting 214 hectares of Sitka on the other side, 1km away.”

Documents show about 30 per cent (about 20,100ha) of a ten-mile radius area around Langholm (72,867ha) is primarily conifer forestry. A further 2,457 ha of land is potentially under forestry development, including Warblaw.

While Scottish Woodlands said half of the 1,050ha site on Warblaw would be retained for agriculture, SWAG said the development, if it were to go ahead, would link up to 350ha of a predominantly Sitka spruce forest planted by the previous landowner.

Another SWAG member said: “Dumfries and Galloway is slowly disappearing under a carpet of Sitka spruce.”

The group pointed to a Royal Society of Edinburgh report released earlier this year urging conifer plantations to no longer receive public subsidies. 

The paper concluded funding should instead be diverted to planting millions of native broadleaf trees, which capture and keep more CO2, support more plant and animal species, store more carbon in the soil, and have a far longer lifespan.

Meanwhile scientists this year said trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Preliminary findings by an international team of researchers showed the amount of carbon absorbed on land has temporarily collapsed.

Speaking in The Guardian, Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, from Exeter University, who oversees the annual Global Carbon Budget calculations, said: “We shouldn’t rely on natural forests to do the job. We really, really have to tackle the big issue - fossil fuel emissions across all sectors.

“We can’t just assume that we have forests and the forest will remove some CO2, because it’s not going to work in the long term.”

Scottish Forestry has a budget of £45m for its Forestry Grant Scheme (FGS), which goes towards funding new woodlands.

The public body said funding contribution to these schemes was gradually being reduced, with large commercial schemes already receiving lower rates of grant compared to smaller farmer and native schemes.

A Scottish Forestry spokesperson said: “Conifers have many benefits as they sequester harmful CO2 many times faster than broadleaves and the timber gained from these forests goes to wooden products that lock up carbon for its lifetime. And that is on top of supporting many thousands of rural jobs and reducing the need to import wood. “Abruptly stopping public funding for these schemes would have significant unintended consequences and would likely result in a drastic reduction in tree planting in Scotland, including native planting as most schemes include a mixture of species.”

The spokesperson said around half of the woodlands supported FGS are new native woodlands. They added: “Productive conifer schemes, which can include Sitka spruce, can also be supported, but only where the environmental and concerns of communities have been addressed.

“The Warblaw proposal is still at a relatively early stage of development, and the woodland creation application process requires that the developer identifies and considers the full range of environmental and community issues, including the risk of self-seeding onto the neighbouring nature reserve.” If approved, planting on Warblaw would start in spring next year.