the 'todays job' thread

[doobin]

23 minutes ago, Stubby said:

Sandy soil then Doobs ?

Very. It's over near Coates.

 

@stere- you are correct! See below. Also take a close gander at the pic post flail collecting- you'll see some heather that I deliberately missed. The grassy patches in the other photos are areas that we cleared a year ago. They have come back (along with supplementary bracken rolling and flail collecting) to a good variety of fine acid grassland, which along with some heather is just the ticket for the field cricket- what this is all about. Of course we're balancing other interests here too, so there are some scrapes for lizards, beetle banks from the scraped turf, plenty of scalloped edges, various growth stages of scrub, some deadwood and some songposts for the birds.

 

Acid heath with the right boxes ticked is worth £700 / ha /year under the new stewardship options. Yet desite this, correct manangement is very often lacking. Sometimes just a pass with a topper so that if they are ever inspected for compliance it still vaguely resembles heath. I'm torn between being grateful for the work, and wishing that it was just maintained correctly in the first place.

 

When it gets too far gone, capital works projects like this are applied for. By pulling the scub out by the roots and moving it to a dump site, you remove the potential nitrogen loading that would arise from just mulching it and also end up with randomised bare ground- which luckily is exactly what heather (the seeds of which can lay dormant for 80 years) needs to germinate. Basically, if heather was present in the past (and it was here before it was all put to pine plantation) then it will come back given the right conditions.

 

It's quite an interesting job. I really like it- it's a long run of work, nobody bothers you, you deal with one set of staged payments, it's reasonable money. And if you take a little bit of time to understand exactly what is required and learn some plants you can do a really good job. Quite satisfying when you're ripping out the gorse taller than the machine, and you come to a little patch of heather just hanging on. So you clear all around it and give it space to breathe, along with some bare ground to spread. Not all the gorse needs to come out, and the minor gorse can be left wherever it is found.

[Stere]

How one modest shrub entrapped humans in its service | Aeon Essays

AEON.CO

---

As Neolithic people transformed prehistoric forests, they stumbled into an ecological trap. Domestication goes both...

 

Thought this  article was an interesting  viewpoint on heather....

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JLA1990]

38 minutes ago, doobin said:

Very. It's over near Coates.

 

@stere- you are correct! See below. Also take a close gander at the pic post flail collecting- you'll see some heather that I deliberately missed. The grassy patches in the other photos are areas that we cleared a year ago. They have come back (along with supplementary bracken rolling and flail collecting) to a good variety of fine acid grassland, which along with some heather is just the ticket for the field cricket- what this is all about. Of course we're balancing other interests here too, so there are some scrapes for lizards, beetle banks from the scraped turf, plenty of scalloped edges, various growth stages of scrub, some deadwood and some songposts for the birds.

 

Acid heath with the right boxes ticked is worth £700 / ha /year under the new stewardship options. Yet desite this, correct manangement is very often lacking. Sometimes just a pass with a topper so that if they are ever inspected for compliance it still vaguely resembles heath. I'm torn between being grateful for the work, and wishing that it was just maintained correctly in the first place.

 

When it gets too far gone, capital works projects like this are applied for. By pulling the scub out by the roots and moving it to a dump site, you remove the potential nitrogen loading that would arise from just mulching it and also end up with randomised bare ground- which luckily is exactly what heather (the seeds of which can lay dormant for 80 years) needs to germinate. Basically, if heather was present in the past (and it was here before it was all put to pine plantation) then it will come back given the right conditions.

 

It's quite an interesting job. I really like it- it's a long run of work, nobody bothers you, you deal with one set of staged payments, it's reasonable money. And if you take a little bit of time to understand exactly what is required and learn some plants you can do a really good job. Quite satisfying when you're ripping out the gorse taller than the machine, and you come to a little patch of heather just hanging on. So you clear all around it and give it space to breathe, along with some bare ground to spread. Not all the gorse needs to come out, and the minor gorse can be left wherever it is found.

Nice work when you get it.

 

We were tasked with translocating turves a few months back. Turves moved onto prepped areas of tall ruderal vegetation on a meadow to form one large area of unimproved grassland. Idea is for it to be managed effectively and provide a high quality grassland of value for nature conservation. The grassland is species-rich with several acid/neutral grassland indicator plants such as corky-fruited water dropwort and hoary ragwort.

 

[doobin]

14 hours ago, Stere said:

How one modest shrub entrapped humans in its service | Aeon Essays

AEON.CO

---

As Neolithic people transformed prehistoric forests, they stumbled into an ecological trap. Domestication goes both...

 

Thought this  article was an interesting  viewpoint on heather....

 

 

 

 

 

 

Absoloutely fascinating (in a geeky kind of way!) Thank you.

[AHPP]

I thought that article was dreadfully written and never really got round to the point the title suggested it would make. Can anyone summarise it please.

[Stere]

Humans shape a landscape  to suit the heather & heather predominance shapes human history

 

The thesis is of heather being a keystone ecological species abit  like the wolves in yellowstone intertwined with humans history  and  the heath as a cultural landscape.

 

Heather burning has affected evolution

PARTNER.SCIENCENORWAY.NO

---

Heather seeds germinate faster after a fire.Though only in cultural landscapes.

 

 

 

 

My  personal  take & going abit off tangent  is:

 

Alot of consevation effort now taken to preserve this plagioclimatic vegetation on degraded soil.

 

Its an ecological niche for certain rare species but overall its a greatly less productive habitat in total wildlife biomass as the soil is very nutrient poor.

 

Other such cultural degraded lanscapes are often seen as  a negative - desertification soil erosion  caused by overgrazing etc.

 

overgrazing

ESDAC.JRC.EC.EUROPA.EU

 

 

 

From above link:

 

Quote

As a result of these views, the "Ruined Landscape" theory about Mediterranean Europe has been developed (Grove and Rackham, 2001).

 

 

Heathland could also be regarded as ruined lanscape.

 

Heatland conservation  to me seems abit like  fighting against the tide due to the ongoing efforts required to maintain it in statis,  as the historical  agricultural practices that were used creating the lanscape in the first place no longer occur.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[AHPP]

But what about the domestication cutting both ways? How have humans become slaves to heathland? I understand the stuff about young growth being more nutritious for domesticated grazing animals but we're all accounts executives with digital watches these days. Food comes from the shop and whether it's self-maintaining heathland, or aspiring or final woodland, you can't easily put a Starbucks on it so it doesn't really matter.

[Stere]

Yeah I didn't really buy that part.

 

Its trying to say its  a version off  this idea i think?

 

Human-Plant Coevolution: A modelling framework for theory-building on the origins of agriculture

WWW.REPOSITORY.CAM.AC.UK

 

Human-Plant Coevolution (HPC) model

 

The Human-Plant Coevolution (HPC) model
Human-plant interaction is a specific case of animal-plant interaction, which spans predator-
prey, mutualistic and symbiotic relationships. All ecological relationships consistent in time
are driven by coevolution, where each party exerts selective pressures on the other, eventually
redefining their genetic (and cultural) construct [53, 56–58]. Under mutualistic coevolution,
the interaction between two populations increases the total potential return or carrying capac-
ity of the environment for each species. At the same time, it also modifies the selective pres-
sures acting over the populations involved. In this light, plant domestication is similar to other
mutualistic relationships, where coevolution made possible the emergence of certain traits,
manifested at physiological, morphological and behavioural levels; e.g., insects and fungi [59]
and ants and acacias

 

 

Did humans domesticate plants, or did they domesticate us? | Salon.com

WWW.SALON.COM

---

Scientists are trying to better understand the origins of agriculture, and how we coevolved with our favored crops

 

Quote

In his 2014 book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that "the Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud," and that plants like wheat, rice and potatoes "domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa." 

"Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world," Harari writes. Today, "wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth" and it wasn't through human intuition, but plant intelligence.

 

Quote

Harari's book has been widely dismissed as "infotainment" that doesn't rely much on scientific evidence, but it appears that either way of framing domestication is oversimplified. Humans didn't just domesticate plants and plants didn't just domesticate humans. We domesticated each other, through coevolution and mutualism, a symbiosis that is beneficial to both organisms involved.

 

 

Specific to heather:

 

Heather burning has affected evolution

PARTNER.SCIENCENORWAY.NO

---

Heather seeds germinate faster after a fire.Though only in cultural landscapes.

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Stere

[AHPP]

8 hours ago, Stere said:

Yeah I didn't really buy that part.

 

Its trying to say its  a version off  this idea i think?

 

Human-Plant Coevolution: A modelling framework for theory-building on the origins of agriculture

WWW.REPOSITORY.CAM.AC.UK

 

Human-Plant Coevolution (HPC) model

 

The Human-Plant Coevolution (HPC) model
Human-plant interaction is a specific case of animal-plant interaction, which spans predator-
prey, mutualistic and symbiotic relationships. All ecological relationships consistent in time
are driven by coevolution, where each party exerts selective pressures on the other, eventually
redefining their genetic (and cultural) construct [53, 56–58]. Under mutualistic coevolution,
the interaction between two populations increases the total potential return or carrying capac-
ity of the environment for each species. At the same time, it also modifies the selective pres-
sures acting over the populations involved. In this light, plant domestication is similar to other
mutualistic relationships, where coevolution made possible the emergence of certain traits,
manifested at physiological, morphological and behavioural levels; e.g., insects and fungi [59]
and ants and acacias

 

 

Did humans domesticate plants, or did they domesticate us? | Salon.com

WWW.SALON.COM

---

Scientists are trying to better understand the origins of agriculture, and how we coevolved with our favored crops

 

 

 

 

Specific to heather:

 

Heather burning has affected evolution

PARTNER.SCIENCENORWAY.NO

---

Heather seeds germinate faster after a fire.Though only in cultural landscapes.

 

No. It's still 4500 pretty empty words that explain not a lot.

[Jwoodgardenmaintenance]

Before and after customer supplied grass and it looks 💩 in all honesty 

 

Jack