Growing threat to Scots pine... from oak

THEY have grown in Scotland for more than 8,000 years.

But the Scots pine is under threat from the mighty oak.

Climate change means that the environment is now more suited to the oak to grow in, say researchers.

Efforts to conserve the remaining Highland fragments of the ancient Caledonian pine forest may be doomed unless a new strategy is rapidly adopted, experts at Durham University have warned. Using computer modelling, Professor Brian Huntley’s team showed there is an imbalance between the present-day warmer climate and the dominance of Scots pine in some forest areas.

It means that if those areas were disturbed or destroyed – possibly as a result of a fire or disease – they would be replaced by oak woodlands. Scots pine forests thrived under the cooler conditions before the Industrial Revolution. The annual mean temperature in the Highlands has risen by 0. C since 1800.

According to the study, a ‘climatic debt’ has been accumulated which means that if the Scots pines die or are destroyed, they will be replaced by the oaks more suited to today’s higher temperatures.

Professor Huntley, of Durham University’s Department of Biosciences, said: ‘The climatic debt will be repaid when the pines forming the present forest canopy die or are killed, when oaks and other trees better adapted to the climatic conditions now prevailing will replace them.

‘Such an outcome is inevitable; the only question is how soon it will come about.’

The study – funded by the Natural Environment Research Council – says the Scots pine sites need to be managed to encourage ecosystem adaptation to climate changes that have already occurred, as well as to those expected over the remainder of the present century.