Wilder Carna
Due to the great foresight of the Island owners the Isle of Carna has been free from livestock for over twenty years. This lack of agricultural management gives us a rare glimpse of how effectively a previously overgrazed, treeless landscape will regenerate, unaided, in a temperate region of the world.
Regeneration has occurred but has been limited in diversity with the main tree species dominated by birch. Much of the field layer has become rank with purple moor grass or smothered by bracken.
The Isle of Carna is a beautiful 600 Acre Island
in Loch Sunart on the West Coast of Scotland.
The Island has two holiday cottages available to let.
Our Project Aims:
Ecosystem Processes
To facilitate the highest level of species diversity possible without favoring a particular species or habitat.
We focus on restoring ecosytem processes and let nature decide the rest.
Climate Support
To support climate cooling functions through healthy soil building and increased longevity of photosynthesis.
By keeping healthy soils covered with green growing plants and encouraging a diversity of habitats, including trees, we can support the cooling hydrological functions responsible for 95% of the heat dynamics of the planet.
Nutrient Cycling
To ensure the whole food web is supplied with minerals for optimal health and that they’re quickly recycled.
Part of this process involves mimicking the action of predated large herbivores by bunching and moving cattle to stimulate nutrient cycling and create ‘herd effect’ then allowing long periods of recovery.
Truly Sustainable
To help support the family owners in creating a resilient and profitable enterprise that will ensure this management is truly sustainable.
To develop a model that can be scaled and replicated over some of the vast upland landscapes of the North West Highlands and Islands.
Regeneration or Planting?
We are supporting regeneration over and above tree planting to maintain the wild and un-fenced nature of the Island.
Some absent species such as hawthorn will be incorporated into hedges and small copses to provide a seed source.
We are developing native ‘wild’ composting techniques to improve the complexity of the soil biology in regenerating areas.
Complexity and Balance
To support the establishment of all native tree saplings through deer control and encourage natural habitat ‘mosaics’ and create more dead wood within woodland to increase diversity.
To support small predators like otter, eagle and fox and introduce ponies and pigs to create complexity and therefore better balance in the food web.
From Good to Great.
The long period of rest has allowed woodland and dry heath to develop which supports a range of important species.
The new woodland however, is predominantly birch, and the grassland and dry heath habitats are becoming choked up with deep plant litter that is limiting photosynthesis – which supplies energy to the entire food web – and impeding succession to a more diverse natural habitat.
In a natural ecosystem, large herbivores, predated by wolves and lynx, would graze down and trample this plant material allowing sunlight to reach more plants and open up patches of soil and transfer seed allowing tree saplings to germinate and increase the cycling minerals they need to thrive.
We hope by restoring some of the missing ecological functions we can achieve a faster and more complex ecological restoration that would be achieved by simply allowing the environment to ‘rest.’