When you visit a woodland
that is thriving, a woodland that is natural and teeming with life.
This, of course, has quite a lot to do with the trees, but actually
has a lot to do with the understory too, the life beneath the canopy.
After all a woodland without an understory is just a bunch of trees.
The understory is made up of a dynamic mix of many different species,
all kinds of plants ranging from shrubs, fungi,
mosses, lichens to wildflowers and climbers.
When all of these elements of present over many, many years
woodlands feel and are more complete.
And here at Mossy Earth,
we recognize that
there are actually many woodlands which are missing these components
so often newly party woodlands mature with their plastic guards still attached
and with little to no species diversity making up the ground flora.
And other times it's natural woodlands that have been mismanaged with
both standing and fallen deadwood being removed.
So welcome to Scotland here for our Understory restoration project.
I'm here with Ellie and Peter there over there in the woods having a chat.
And today
we're going to be giving you an update on our Understory restoration project.
This is actually episode two in our Understory Restoration series.
And we're back with Peter, who runs Eadha Enterprises, a homegrown nursery
which focuses on sourcing and cultivating rare plants in Scotland.
We're going to be taking a look at two different sites,
where we've been working with Eadha taking a look at their nursery, and Ellie,
our biologist, will be explaining
how we plan to expand and improve this project overall.
But before we do that, you might be wondering
what even is an understory and why is it worth restoring?
Now although trees are essential to woodlands, this so much more to a healthy woodland
than just trees.
And it's the tallest trees which make up the canopy layer. In Scotland,
These are species such as ash birch, Scots, pine and oak.
Broadly speaking, everything under the canopy can be called
the understory, but it's actually made up of a few different layers.
So first and here we actually have the scrub layer.
Now this is made up of younger, smaller Oh! Bug in the eye...
younger, smaller, shade tolerant species such as Hawthorn and Holly.
And then you have the herb layer, which is made up of wildflowers,
grasses and ferns.
And then finally you have the ground layer, which is made up of a variety
of different mosses, lichens, fungi and decaying matter.
And many of these can be epiphytic and grow on mature trees,
which just turns woodlands into these green wonderlands.
All of these layers of habitat, they support
a huge diversity of different flora.
And this in turn supports
all kinds of different mammals, birds, insects and amphibians.
And in fact, many of our woodland species are adapted to carry out different stages
of their lifecycle in the different layers of the woodland.
And this means that many of our iconic woodland species
simply cannot thrive until the understory is in place.
Locherwoods is our first stop and is actually the site which featured in episode
one. It's a relatively young woodland that was planted on to improve grasslands,
so the understory was non-existent before we began work here.
Well, there was a monoculture of grass, but this is less than ideal.
Our work so far has included removing all of the old plastic tree guards
and planting up some woodland wildflowers and coming back this time
and looking around, although they're still quite small.
Many of the flowers are beginning to establish themselves.
It's important that we plant these flowers and kicks out the process
as they would take decades, maybe even centuries, to naturally establish.
So what do we have in the tray here, what species?
We have bugle in the tray here, nice woodland plant
We're hoping it takes under this kinda dappled shade here.
Yeah.
So you just you just go for areas which have a better light coming through.
Yeah.
We're looking at areas where there's very little vegetation at the moment.
It was great to see a local
volunteer group getting stuck in and even Ellie got involved too.
So here we're planting Bugle, Wood Avens and self-heal
lovely woodland flowers and as well as all of these flowers
we've also been planting Aspen here too. Locherwoods has quite a bit of ash dieback
Here's an ash, Here's another one, just completely dead.
On the one hand, it creates valuable standing deadwood, crucial
to a functioning understory And the bark peeling off,
creates a completely different habitat.
I'll leave it on, but if you take that off there will be loads of insects under there.
Yeah. Yeah.
But on the other hand, given that this woodland is still quite young
and what with many of the trees being ash, we could lose the canopy cover.
We have recognized this and with Peter we have been planting native Aspen.
It's also a tree which is regionally scarce
and with all of its benefits to wildlife is great having it.
at Locherwoods
So Peter's just showing us here the nursery here at Eadha.
This is where a lot of the wildflowers and the aspen have begun their life.
So how has it been keeping everything going?
Watered.
Yeah, yeah.
Keeping everything watered. Yeah,
yeah.
Lots of volunteer help, which is what we needed. That's last year's Aspen.
micro crop plug's just been put it on recently.
The nursery relies a lot upon the dedication of Peter and his team,
but also local volunteers.
Over the years, despite their small size,
Eadha have been prolific in finding, cultivating and planting
lots of rare flowers, shrubs and trees all across Scotland.
We're just trying to rescue a Damselfly
Damsel in distress.
Oh, it's cold out here now
It's like: 'It's freezing out here!'
Yeah, but there's more to it out here, right?
Yeah.
I will always insist on wearing shorts when it's the Summer,
even if I'm walking through stinging nettles.
So this is another site where we've been doing some understory restoration.
Now, compared to Locherwoods where we just were,
this woodland is a little bit older and there is an understory here.
There's some lovely flowers here, theres a butterfly flying around.
But what we've been doing here is we've been introducing some rarer
and just different species to increase the diversity.
We'd missed it flowering.
But one species which is doing well is Moschatel
is quite common in the rest of the UK, but not so much in Scotland.
In situations like this, when a plant is regionally rare,
it's quite common to get a cutting and cultivate from remnant
isolated populations and bring them to new sites.
This site
actually has some really nice natural characteristics of a healthy understory
and we will be explaining in just a minute how we can incorporate this
into our strategy.
So now I think would be a pretty good time to tell you how
we're able to fund this project and all of our others here at Mossy Earth.
So far for this project, we've put forward £10,784.97
As usual, we fund all of this work through our community, through our
Mossy Earth members who contribute a small amount each month
to allow us to set up these kinds of rewilding projects.
If you are curious about helping us do this, then be sure to
check out our other videos and of course our website where you can sign up.
You can find it by typing in mossy.earth
or through the link in the description and in the pinned comment down below.
We work hard to be super transparent how we spend the money
and the impacts that we have.
We do this on a weekly basis in the account while adding
to our in-depth transparency database, writing a detailed monthly field report.
And we make these videos here on YouTube.
Plus, if you ever wanted to have a chat with the team, you can do this.
Over on Discord.
Our Understory Project is still very much in its infancy.
This is why we've been thinking about how we can expand it.
So far.
We've removed plastic tree guards and planted wildflowers.
It's a good start, but there are many more other elements which we want to include.
Here's Ellie to explain this further.
So I guess we've started with one of the simpler components with the flora
But obviously as your woodland matures,
you want all of your mosses and lichens to come back in.
Many of those come naturally if you've got source populations nearby.
So it's about assessing those and where that's not possible,
considering how you can sustainably create source populations within that woodland.
Just to give it a bit of a kick start, you can go all of your fungi,
both mycorrhizal fungi, that are symbiotic with the tree and help it grow
and survive in periods of stress, particularly drought.
And then you've also got your saprotrophic fungi,
which are really important for nutrient cycling
and to keep the whole system running the overall habitat structure,
not about any particular species composition, tree structural diversity,
dead wood, as well as young regeneration like the complete range.
And it doesn't have to be evenly distributed.
You can have like the habitat mosaic as long as it's there
within the whole kind of landscape scale thats what we're looking to recreate,
because that gives you the resilience
for the different species to move through the landscape.
As you can see, things can be a little complex
when considering restoring all elements of an understory,
but we're confident that we can pull together
some really quite interesting methods that will enable us to achieve this.
Our next steps are to run some pilot projects, really refine our methods
and you'll be seeing this in our next episode on this project.
So there's an update for you on our Understory Restoration project.
I think it's shaping up
to be a really quite exciting one, going to be a very impactful one.
And yeah, it's just lovely being in this habitat
when you've got all the flowers coming up and all the insects buzzing around.
If you've got this far in the video, you may as well leave a like on it
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Yeah, we just work hard to keep you updated on everything here at Mossy Earth.
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Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.