Native Woodlands

Protecting and creating native woodland

Native woodlands provide extremely important habitats to a huge variety of wildlife, especially in the area surrounding Carna. The Atlantic Oakwood native woodland habitat once covered the whole western fringe of Europe from Spain to Norway with the warm and wet climate of the Gulf Stream providing the perfect growing conditions for this complex web of oak, birch, rowan, hazel and holly and almost more importantly the rich diversity of lichens, mosses and ferns that grow on and around them. These in turn provide for an abundance of insects, rare butterflies and birds. This habitat is in fact the European rainforest but only fragments survive, the largest part in Britain and mainly on the west coast of Scotland. Loch Sunart contains one of the best examples and the Sunart Oakwoods Initiative was a recent scheme to help encourage its management and regeneration. Carna has some surviving mature native woodland established prior to 1890, mainly on its western edge where it has been protected from overgrazing, and has already benefitted from native woodland regeneration in the past which has had encouraging results but requires some action to broaden its scope and help it along. Species consist mainly of native examples such as downy birch, alder, sessile oak, holly, hazel, silver birch, ash, willow and hawthorn with a small conifer plantation of Scots Pine and a few others. Our Native Woodlands Project will:

• Protect important mature trees and previous regeneration from grazing and other threats
• Encourage new native woodland regeneration
• Plant areas of protected or No Fence Planting native woodland within regeneration areas
• Create specific Atlantic Hazelwood habitat where possible
• Incorporate tree protection and planting within the in-bye land and wildlife corridors.

Want to help us protect and create new woodland? Your donations will help us achieve this and would be very gratefully received. Any donation over £20 will receive a personalised gift certificate and for £50 you can dedicate a grove of native trees for yourself, a loved one or your business.