New study shows upland management requires a variety of tools – including burning

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A major landmark study which has found that there is no ‘one size fits all’ heather management method for protecting carbon-rich peatlands has been welcomed by the NGO.

The management of heather in the uplands, and the method by which it is – or isn’t ­– carried out is a topic that is always divisive and often provokes debate. Prescribed burning tends to be the most controversial method of controlling heather, however it is also one of the most useful tools for a land manager, provided it is carried out safely, correctly, and in the right areas.

This is a twenty-year study, carried out by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) based at the University of York, and the report has been published at the ten-year mark.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the report is that scientists found that all three options: heather burning, mowing or leaving it unmanaged, should be available in upland land managers’ toolkits, with each method delivering different benefits and negatives to climate change, water storage and quality, and biodiversity in the uplands.

Vitally, the method used should be determined by the condition of that particular piece of land and particular aspects: there was no ‘one size fits all’ approach.

It is very easy to become entrenched into an idea that one management system is “bad” and another “good”; what the study has shown so far is that while some methods offer short-term positives, the long-term effects often differ from the immediate ones.

This is why this piece of research is so important; the fact that it is running over twenty years means that there is far more information on the longer-term effects of the various methods, and means that the researchers can go into far more detail that previous studies.

It is easy to paint prescribed burning as a villain, as organisations such as the RSPB often do. But the study shows that while burnt sites do initially release carbon, after ten years burnt plots absorbed more than twice the carbon of mown areas. Mown and uncut sites both absorb about half the carbon per year of burnt plots, while the current predictions from this study suggest that uncut plots will gradually absorb less and less over the next decade. Mown and burnt plots will likely keep absorbing at similar levels for a considerable time.

The research has also indicated that in areas where heather was not managed but was left to grow, water tables gradually dropped throughout the project. This means that the peat dried out – which is when they begin to release carbon. Dried-out peat combined with unmanaged heather is probably the worst combination in a wildfire scenario. With scientists predicting that wildfires will become more frequent across Northern Europe in future, wildfire risk is something that should be treated as a major concern.

With vast amounts of manpower and money being invested into rewetting peat, this is perhaps the time to rethink some of the decisions being made in the uplands and to make sure that land-management plans are led by robust science, not emotions.

The full report and more information on the study can be found here: https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/research/heather-management-protecting-peatlands/