When trees are planted in open habitats that support breeding waders, numbers usually decline pretty quickly. Trees not only directly remove once-occupied habitat, they are also thought to attract predators, by providing somewhere to hide. In their paper in Restoration Ecology, Mark Hancock and colleagues investigate the distribution of thousands of scats of mammalian predators, in order to understand predator activity in landscapes associated with open bogs and forest edge. They were particularly interested in seeing how long it takes for predators to move out of an area when trees are removed and the land once more reverts to blanket bog.
This study took place alongside a project to repair damage to the vast Flow Country blanket bog (northern Scotland), that occurred in the 1980s, when non-native conifer trees were planted in areas of deep peat that had been drained and deep-ploughed. Such forestry practises would nowadays be prohibited.
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