Composition of Regenerating Woodland in Coille Ruigh, Autumn 2001
In 2001, Clare Cummings, carried out a study of the naturally-regenerating pine woodland at Coille Ruigh na Cuileige in Glen Affric, to follow up the previous surveys done by Paul Blanchflower in 1990 and by herself in 1996.
Here is the summary of Clare's work, from her survey report:
Summary
This survey provides baseline data on the structure of naturally regenerating Scots pine woodland. Coille Ruigh is approximately 50 hectares. Ten, 10 metre wide transects, running from North to South, of between 290 m. and 730 m. length (according to the width of the exclosure) were set up approximately 100 metres apart. Transect 1 being across the most eastern side of the exclosure and transect 10 being the most westerly. In this way we surveyed 10.56% of the area, which statistically speaking means the resulting data is representative of the whole 50 hectares.
Species distribution and height of all native regenerating seedlings and saplings were recorded within the transects.
In total there were 9,695 regenerating seedlings and saplings, 59.2% (5,734) were Scots pine, 33.3% (3,221) rowan, 6.4% (630) birch and 1% (98) eared willow. Juniper, 0.12% (12) is reasonably well-represented considering how much of the area is very wet. From these figures we can extrapolate and say stocking density is around 3,700 per hectare (37 per 10 metre square).
The resulting tables indicate pockets of birch, pockets of rowan mixed with Scots pine and pockets of Scots pine. (The exact species of birch was not recorded but was mainly downy birch with some silver birch and quite a few hybrids).
The rowan present is mainly found beneath mature Scots pine. The percentage of birch is quite low but probably due to the lack of suitable habitat. Absent species include aspen of which there is none in the exclosure and holly. Neither of the two holly trees fell within a transect.
The data collected on height distribution showed two trends. First, most of the seedlings were under 0.5 metres high. The second trend highlighted is that overall the average number of species per quadrat decreases westward, and the average height of the seedlings/saplings also decreases from east to west.
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