UK Nature and Environment

My TL;DR:

More than half the seabird species breeding on British and Irish coasts have declined over the last 20 years, according to the most comprehensive census to date.

Eleven of 21 nesting seabirds species have fallen, five species have remained stable and five have increased, some because of targeted conservation work, according to the Seabirds Count survey.

British and Ireland are internationally important for seabirds, holding most of the world’s nesting Manx shearwaters, northern gannets and great skuas and more than half of the north Atlantic populations of lesser black-backed gulls and common guillemots.

Some species have declined due to climate change reducing food availability and increasing storminess at nest sites, while others have been hit by commercial fishers depleting fish populations and, in some cases, predation on land by invasive mammals such as brown rats.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4450355

My TL;DR:

Five years ago, when Mark Barrow started his project to film along the 65-mile River Wharfe in Yorkshire, he captured footage of majestic shoals of grayling, the fish known as “the Lady of the Stream”, some 200 or 300 strong.

Recently, Barrow returned to the same spot, near the historic Harewood House on the outskirts of Leeds, to reshoot some video because he wasn’t happy with the quality of his earlier attempt.

What he found shocked him. The water was cloudy with pollution and the numbers of grayling, with their distinctive red fins and pewter scales, were reduced to pockets of no more than 30 or 40.

As well as grayling, the Wharfe is home to perch, chub, trout, barbel and even mussels. But Barrow said that he swam through sections of the river “completely devoid of life”.

The main culprit for pollution is combined sewer overflows that empty directly into the river. “There are areas where the sediment makes visibility very poor. Where I was once seeing widespread shoals of fish, there are now just pockets of them trapped in the clean water between the sewage overflows.”

He said there were 46 such overflows on the Wharfe, and on more than one occasion, he swam by just as they discharged into the river – leaving him emerging from the water covered in human waste.

Earlier this year, Nicola Shaw, CEO of Yorkshire Water, publicly apologised about the state of the Wharfe and said the utilities company was investing £180m to build more capacity to store wastewater and reduce sewage overspills. She also said she was not taking any bonus from the company because of the situation.

My TL;DR:

Native black poplars were once common across the country. But many of its waterlogged habitats have since been drained and few native specimens were planted after the 19th century. Whenever landowners did plant native specimens, they favoured males that came without the cotton-like seed fluff produced by female flowers. Opportunities for wild specimens to reproduce naturally are consequently rare.

Black poplars are easy to multiply through taking cuttings. It’s an effective way to preserve a specific local population. But it also means the same clones now proliferate everywhere, since cuttings create exact genetic copies.

In 2018, a team of scientists published findings from DNA analyses of 811 samples of native black poplars, sent in by landowners over more than a decade. Among them, they identified only 87 genetically distinct clones, or genotypes.

That can be a problem because it leaves the species more vulnerable to disease and other threats. To make them more resilient, new trees would ideally be grown from seed, not cuttings. But because cross-pollination of black poplars now rarely occurs in nature, seeds can be hard to come by.

This conundrum has spurred a passionate effort to provide what nature cannot. Earlier this year, Zeke Marshall, a Forest Research scientist, took cuttings from a female tree in Darlington and a male one in Durham.

Once the branches flowered, he used a small paint brush to transfer the male pollen to the female flowers. He managed to harvest 205 seeds and sent most of them to Kew, where Chris Jenkins, nursery manager at the Royal Botanic Gardens, has grown about 30 seedlings. Each one is crucially a genetically distinct mix of its two parent trees.

Cottrell, the head of genetics at Forest Research, says Marshall and Jenkins’ work could be crucial. By creating new genotypes, this would eventually provide a wider spectrum of specimens for natural selection to take hold – which is particularly important in an era of both worsening climate change and increasing threats from introduced pests and diseases.

Populations of the hazel dormouse, perhaps the most elusive native British mammal, have plummeted by 70% this century.

The nocturnal, tree-dwelling animals are now extinct in 20 counties in England and the species must be reclassified as “endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, according to a study by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES).

Since the previous State of Britain’s Dormice report was published in 2019, they have vanished from Hertfordshire, Staffordshire and Northumberland.

Reintroducing lost species into nature-depleted Britain is ‘not a priority’, the government said last week. Enter a growing movement of guerrilla rewilders, who are secretly breeding butterflies, birds and beavers, and illegally releasing them across the country. Are they halting the tide of extinction, or doing more harm than good?

As rewilding has turned from a niche interest into a cultural phenomenon, the worsening biodiversity crisis has radicalised a growing group of ‘guerrilla rewilders’ who refuse to play by the rules, concerned by the rapid decline of nature in Britain and outraged by the government’s lack of action (last week it confirmed that bringing back lost species is “not a priority”).

Hundreds of native plants and animals have vanished over the past two centuries alone in Britain. Recent analysis by researchers found that one in six of Britain’s surviving species is now threatened with extinction. A study by the Natural History Museum put the UK in the bottom 10 per cent of the world’s countries when it comes to biodiversity intactness.

Guerrilla rewilding has not only drawn the ire of typical opponents of species releases, like farmers, but also faces strong criticism from established conservation groups and many ecologists. They warn that guerrilla rewilders like Simon risk spreading diseases and altering fragile ecosystems. They also fear that setting free controversial species, like beavers, will simply get the animals killed and further polarise the debate over nature restoration.

In England, you have to apply for a licence to release any species no longer present in the wild, from the Eurasian elk, which died out in the 13th century, to the short-haired bumblebee, declared extinct in 2000. The same goes for a number of native species that have already been reintroduced, but which the government says could cause conflict or be compromised by “poorly planned” releases, such as barn owls, wild boar, red kites and white-tailed eagles.

“I think anyone involved in these things would be much happier to do it legitimately. But it’s made almost impossible by government to do so,” says Ben Goldsmith, a financier and environmentalist who has long supported rewilders like Gow, including financially, and has wild beavers on his own land in Somerset.

UK forests are heading for “catastrophic ecosystem collapse” within the next 50 years due to multiple threats including disease, extreme weather and wildfires, researchers have warned, with trees dying on a large scale.

The study, published in the journal Forestry, was put together by a panel of 42 researchers, with 1,200 experts consulted. Lead author, Dr Eleanor Tew, head of forest planning at Forestry England and visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, described the finding as “sobering and alarming”.

Bradshaw is the chief caretaker of some of the country’s rarest flowers. She has spent seven decades obsessively studying the unique arctic-alpine flora of Teesdale, in the north of England.

Where once [these flora] were widespread in Britain, now only fragments remain, and 28 species are threatened with extinction.

“Everything about Teesdale is unique,” says Bradshaw with pride – and the authority of someone who has just written a 288-page book on the subject.

[...]

Since the 1960s, plant abundance has dropped by 54% on average. Some have essentially disappeared, such as the dwarf milkwort, down by 98%, and the hoary whitlow-grass, down by 100% (there is now just one recorded plant). Her data suggests these “shocking” declines are continuing.

Bradshaw sees those declines as British heritage disappearing. She says: “We’ve got various buildings in the country – Stonehenge, Durham Cathedral, and others; if they were crumbling away, there would be groups and money helping stop it, because people would say: ‘We can’t let this happen.’

Despite Bradshaw’s guardianship of this land, and the love and energy she has put into saving it, the future here is unknown. The last words of her book speak to this unrelenting loss. “This is our heritage, this unique assemblage of plant species, mine and yours,” she writes. “In spite of trying, I have failed to prevent its decline, now it is up to you.”

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/13187701

Work is underway to restore rare a rare lowland heathland habitat in a forest in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Lowland heathland is a threatened habitat mainly found in north-west Europe and characterised by heathers, gorse and grasses.

The UK has lost 80% of this important habitat during the last two centuries, but still retains 20% of the world’s lowland heathland.

Campaigners fear the change of approach could lead to more pollution in England’s rivers and waterways if the new measuring methods are less rigorous.

Recent analysis found that many toxic chemicals and pesticides banned in the bloc since Brexit are not outlawed for use in the UK. Ministers are also attempting to rip up EU-derived sewage pollution rules for housebuilders.

In 2019, the last time the full water assessments took place, just 14% of rivers were in good ecological health and none met standards for good chemical health.

The Guardian can reveal that the government will be using its own, as yet undisclosed methodology to assess river health. Activists say this may make it harder to compare the state of the country’s rivers against those in the EU, and will leave the public in the dark over pollution from sewage and agriculture.

Vast expanses of rolling hilltops may be easy on the eye. But look a bit closer and many are in fact bleak landscapes – overgrazed and mostly devoid of diverse natural life. Shortsighted agricultural practices, habitat destruction and factory farming are among the causes of an alarming biodiversity crisis in Britain, where one in six species are in danger of local extinction.

Around the edges, however, local wildlife restoration projects are having an impact. Last year, 3.22% of the UK’s land was deemed to be well protected and managed, according to Wildlife Trusts, a slight increase on 2021, and councils are embracing rewilding. More and more community and private projects appear to be springing up too.

The nature restoration project Back on Our Map is one of these. Working in and around the Lake District, it has restored habitats across a series of protected areas from Morecambe Bay to Grizedale Forest, reintroducing species such as the seriously endangered hazel dormouse. It released 69 of the rodents in June 2021, which have since bred, with more than 100 juvenile dormice found in subsequent surveys.

There were also 64 small blue butterflies translocated from a nearby coastal site to widen the population’s geographic range. “Each butterfly was released by a young person from a local primary school,” says Anya Kuliszewski, a community engagement officer. “It was a lovely way of involving the next generation of wildlife enthusiasts.”

A former tree of the year that was chopped down to make way for HS2 is alive and well, regrowing from its transplanted stump.

The pear tree in Cubbington, Warwickshire, thought to be more than 250 years old, became a cause célèbre when it was first threatened with destruction. Despite having won the tree of the year award in 2015 and thousands having signed a petition to save it, the tree was felled in 2020 by HS2 contractors.

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It was feared that attempts to keep alive the much-loved tree – growing in a hedge beside an ancient woodland and thought to be the second oldest pear in Britain – would fail because its trunk was hollow.

But to the delight of local people, the stump and root ball, which was moved by contractors and replanted in a field 100 metres from its original location, is vigorously sprouting new shoots and leaves.

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According to locals, the stump is regrowing because it had the good fortune to be planted in heavy clay soils that stayed moist during recent dry summers. Dry conditions have killed off thousands of young saplings planted by HS2 contractors in mitigation for line-cutting through the ancient South Cubbington Wood.

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Despite pleas by residents and conservationists for a tunnel under the pear and South Cubbington Wood, the high-speed line has cut through the ancient wood. In mitigation for the loss of 2 hectares of ancient woodland, HS2 has planted 60,000 new trees on 17 hectares of land around the wood, with 6 hectares of broadleaved trees linking it to the River Leam corridor.

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The Cubbington pear also lives on across the village of Cubbington, thanks to local people who obtained the assistance of an expert in grafting ancient pears.

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While HS2 proclaims the success of one of its controversial environmental measures, Cubbington residents prefer to see the pear’s survival as a sign of the resilience of nature.

“It’s sort of two fingers to HS2,” said Guiot.

“Photographs are a powerful tool for strengthening our understanding of whale movements and the threats they face – providing vital evidence for effective conservation,” said Dr Lauren Hartny-Mills, science and conservation manager for the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust.

The trust is asking for members of the public to submit their photos – whether recent or historic – to help its scientists learn more about the whales’ movements, health and the threats they face.

"A plan to reintroduce beavers in northern Scotland has been postponed following opposition from landowners, aided by the local SNP politician, Kate Forbes."

Conservationists are racing to protect rare flora and fauna clinging to survival in the UK's last temperate rainforests.

These lush, humid woodlands, mostly along the UK's western coasts, are home to weird and wonderful lichens not found anywhere else on Earth.

The historic decline of rainforests has put some globally important plants and fungi at risk of extinction.

The reason so many of these birds were turning up – almost all of them along the west coasts of Britain and Ireland – was because of the movement of Hurricane Lee up the eastern seaboard of the US. As it progressed, it met migrant birds heading south, on their way to spend the winter in the tropics, and swept them out over the Atlantic Ocean and towards us.

[...] while birders are delighted, the bigger picture is that more extreme weather, including more frequent hurricanes, is very bad news for these birds’ long-term survival.

As the UK's climate warms, there have been noticable in the behaviours of migratory birds.

In similar news, this summer we had bee-eaters returning for the second year in a row, which are birds more common in the southern Mediterranian and northern Africa.