Succession is everything, well almost

Why I think knowing where you’re at in succession is the best measure of progress in rewilding.

Rewilding is one of those words that’s very hard to define. It seems to mean different things to different people. For retractors rewilding might be anything from removing all the people to removing all the jobs. For believers it’s the integration of people and landscape in a way that benefits both. 

I think when we talk about rewilding we should talk about succession. Then it’s easier to define, it’s easier to measure progress, it’s easier to demonstrate the land that represents ecological poverty and the land represents abundance. 

The basis is more life. Rewilders would like to see more life forms, not just more species, but more abundance of individual species and a landscape of fulfilled roles. All those fungi, plants and animals contributing to provision of more and more of the services that builds a thriving system of living things.  

Succession is the process which takes land from having little to no life, and no soil through a long series of development stages and eventually to the climax community. First it’s the pioneering lichen and plant species which when they die add their bodies to the gradual accumulation of organic matter. Their nutrient input and actions open up the floor for a  gradually more complex community of plants, fungi, and animals which continually add their exudates and cadavers to the increasing organic matter. Then we get some thin soil which means more plants can grow, which bring in more fungi and bacteria and protozoa and nematodes and micro-arthropods and worms and pretty soon we’ve got nutrient cycling and a chance for more life to take up the new opportunity and lead that land gradually but steadily towards more and more and more. More food and more living space for more living things. The snowball is rolling.

Of course this can be set back by a fire or a landslide or compaction or fences or heavy or sustained grazing pressure or lava or pollution or a great number of other things. But if the ingredients, in the form of the right organisms are there, nature will keep the painting going, adding layer after layer of complexity and life. It doesn’t stop. Evolution will cleave species in two to fill new niches, create new opportunities and refine all the DNA of all the organisms there to be better suited to meet the challenge of the ever shifting environment. 

In my part of Scotland the climax community is an oak dominant forest. Not a monoculture of oak, but oak at many different stages of life with hazel, willow, alder, rowan and many more tree and plant and fungal players in the mix. A little further west or north it might be a Scots pine dominant forest. Just having oaks or Scots pine isn’t the end of the line, though, the process must continue to evolve for, well ideally hundreds, or even better thousands of years. 

Given that Scotland has lost something like 95% of its original woodland and that woodland would have been – for the most part – climax community it seems reasonable that we should be attempting to re-establish a good proportion of the land which could be climax community to be just that. 

Now this isn’t for everywhere, we have some habitat types where that sort of climax community wouldn’t belong. On the peat bogs, wildflower meadows or wetlands are just some examples. However it’s exciting to think of just how much land we do have that could reach climax potential; if only the brakes were let off. 

I should mention that even within the areas of forests there is space for moorland, there can be bare rock, there can be lochs and bogs all sorts of patchy environments. Lots of edges between the different habitat types and a great diversity of different habitat types.