The Solution That's Bringing Back Britain's Lost Rainforest

There is a habitat entirely missing from the western coast of Britain that can and I believe will come back but it's not going to happen quickly nor will it be easy. Now I said it was entirely missing but that's not completely true because we do still have fragments of it, tiny islands of wonder within a sea of change and I'm sitting next to one of them right now. This is one of Britain's lost rainforests. A habitat which would have covered nearly a quarter of the country. Can you imagine it? They are rich, beautiful and important places. Temperate rainforest really is one of Britain's pinnacle habitats. It's the best which we have to offer and you know it's not just about the biodiversity which they support it's also about the services which they can provide us. Stick with me on this one because I want to show you how Britain's lost rainforests are coming back and how you can play your part too. So 10 years ago I think it's fair to say that most people had never heard of the term temperate rainforest in a British context but today it has become one of the flagship habitats of the nature restoration movement. These forests feel almost magical. Twisted oak trees disappear beneath, thick blankets and moss and ferns are spilling from every surface and rare lichens cling to the ancient branches. Throughout the year on sunny days like this and especially on wet mornings the air feels heavy with moisture and every rock, branch and tree trunk seems to be alive. But their beauty is only part of the story. Temperate rainforests are among the richest habitats in Britain providing home for thousands of species of plants, fungi, insects, birds and mammals. Many of these species struggle to survive anywhere else. Some lichens found in these forests are so rare that Britain now holds internationally important populations and I think what makes them even more remarkable is that these habitats when you visit them they don't feel unusual. For thousands of years rainforests like these covered large areas of western Britain. They were once a defining feature of our landscape. What we're looking at today isn't some exotic habitat or an anomaly, it's a surviving fragment of Britain's own natural heritage and it's one that we must get back. So we believe that temperate rainforest once covered around a fifth of the country stretching across much of the wet western fringes but over centuries these forests were gradually cleared for timber, fuel, farming and development. Development! What was once a vast network of rainforests became fragmented into isolated pockets scattered across the landscape and today only small fragments like that remain like here at Blacktore Copse on Dartmoor. Many of these surviving woodlands are tiny compared to what came before and these fragments continue to face challenges from invasive species, overgrazing, pollution and a changing climate. Yet despite all of this they really do continue to hold on you know in these valleys tucked away along steep river banks and across the wetter parts of western Britain. These forests which remain offer a glimpse into what much of this landscape may once have looked like and that's why organisations like the Thousand Year Trust exist you know not just to protect and enhance the remnants which remain but to try and help this habitat recover and expand throughout Britain and that's what makes this story so exciting. For a long time conservation has focused on protecting the small fragments of rainforest that remain but a growing number of people are beginning to ask a much bigger question what if we didn't just protect Britain's temperate rainforest? What if we brought it back? Across western Britain there are millions of hectares of land with the right rainfall, the right temperatures and the right conditions to support rainforest once again. You see rainforest of course needs high rainfall, it also needs high humidity, fairly stable temperatures and of course trees and I think we've realised that our rainforests are of course incredibly resilient but you know restoring rainforest isn't just about planting more trees. The question is what these landscapes should actually look like in the future. How do we create rainforests that are bigger, richer and more resilient than the fragments that we have today and perhaps most importantly how do we make them work alongside the people who live and work in these landscapes? To find out I travelled back to Cornwall to catch up with Merlin, founder of the Thousand Year Trust. Growing up in one of these rainforests and now spending years thinking about what the next thousand years of Britain's rainforest story could look like, his vision really does go far beyond protecting these surviving fragments and instead he's trying to imagine what a future rainforest landscape could look like and how people can play a role within it. Okay so we're back in the wonderful temperate rainforest which is looking especially beautiful now with all the bluebells. People always ask me they say when is the most beautiful time in the rainforest and I don't like to pick a particular season because I always say the difference between tropical rainforest and temperate rainforest is the seasonality, the dynamism, the constant changing of these Atlantic temperate rainforests which you know in December are covered in snow with not a single bit of green or a leaf to be seen and you can hear the river because there's nothing muffling the sound and there's no bird song and then in autumn you've got that kind of copper bronze and in summer the bracken is eight foot high and you're going through tunnels but right now we're about a week after the bluebells were at their absolute best but the bluebells are still pretty incredible and this is I think it's the best bluebell year I can remember at least in the last decade they have just been disgusting in their that's a good use of the word disgusting yeah is it a mast year this autumn or last autumn we had a mast year are they predictable uh I don't know some people say they can predict them but I think it's quite it's uh it's a false art but um yeah we had a mast year last autumn and we've gathered and we just met Hugh actually coming through who's been helping to manage our tree nursery where he reckons we have 19,000 young oak trees currently growing which is wonderful and he's looking after that and so we probably won't have a mast this year which means there'll be far fewer acorns on the ground but the forest is pretty exceptional it's pretty exceptional yeah I've been a couple of times and it's just wonderful there seems to be many challenges to getting temperate rainforest back and thriving but I think nailing livestock grazing I mean it's just your term in your book agro-rainforestry still not quite caught on but is it not still pushing it are you preaching that to the landowners around here I am doing a lot of that at the moment um there are huge challenges I mean so in terms of re-establishment there are issues with deer and squirrel are the really big ones so we have a lot of deer grazing mainly from row and red and you'll see we passed a few trees that have been I mean even here like you know this that'll be in a row snapping that off we've got more and more trees where you're seeing a bit of bark stripped as soon as the trees are big enough and strong enough for a squirrel to be within the canopy we'll get squirrels starting to strip bark to be able to eat the soft lignum and the sap so squirrel and deer is a big problem that we need to face also and you can see it here really well the bracken the bramble is just shooting up and this is where we work with volunteer groups to help to manage that but also when we bring in native breed grazers browsers they will start to also reduce that that ground cover because that can be that can you know be quite problematic as well so it's really important that you bring in livestock not just to keep farming the land and keep extracting food from it but also the livestock benefits if you imagine when these trees are all 10 20 feet high it will create shade in the summer shelter in the winter and lots of additional forage and and rubbing and and sort of browsing points dominance display dust bowls things like that that's good for the animals it's also good for the trees they get the coppicing they get the manure they get the constant disturbance of the soil and the constant sort of aeration of the soil and so all of these things work together you can't bring back a rainforest without livestock and and the livestock benefits from being within the rainforest as well do we actually believe these landscapes are worth investing in because if projects like this are going to succeed they need more than ambition they need research they need people and they need places where that knowledge can grow and be shared and that's exactly why the thousand year trust is working to build europe's first dedicated temperate rainforest research station and where will the research station be built about 100 meters away from here 100 meters away we've already broken ground okay and the work is starting in uh in earnest this month and next so it's uh it's such an exciting project and why and why is this research station so important well we all know about rainforests but when we hear the word rainforest we think about tropical rainforests and that's because we've all grown up learning at school or watching david asim documentaries about the amazon or borneo or the congo basin and the reason for that is because they're so well studied that we understand how important and how vital they are and yet there is no one doing the important scientific study into our british rainforest and the reason no one's doing it is because there are no facilities that enable that work so we are building europe's first atlantic temperate rainforest research field station here on bodmin moore and it will be a place that facilitates that study all the way from southwest norway to northern portugal across that entire bioclimatic envelope this will be the beating heart of that for scientists academics researchers journalists even the occasional well-behaved politician to come here learn about this habitat in a four thousand year old atlantic temperate rainforest and really unlock the rainforest code in britain it just seems crazy to me that we don't have something like this already for for what is it's tragic one of the most exceptional habitats not just on here but as you said you know there's many countries which which have this habitat so yeah and when you think that we've lost over 98% of our atlantic temperate rainforest and you compare that to the tropical rainforest biome where they've only lost where they've lost 50% and that is a huge tragedy but they still have 50% left we have less than one percent left somewhere around one percent um the time to save it is now in this research station is going to make that a reality this year they need to raise a million pounds in order to make that happen and to help make this happen merlin's father robin has decided to do something extraordinary at 90 years old robin is attempting to water bike more than 100 miles along the river tents and this isn't to achieve a world record or any kind of personal glory he's doing it to help raise money for britain's rainforests after spending a lifetime exploring and advocating for some of the world's greatest rainforests in borneo and the amazon he's now raising funds to help protect one of britain's forgotten ones so if you'd like to go and support the project and support robin you know do go and show the old boy some encouragement it really is a remarkable effort to be doing this at 90 years old i'll leave a link to this down in the description and comments of the video so will britain ever be covered entirely in this you know undisturbed impenetrable rainforest well i think the answer is no the landscape really has changed too much for that and that's not really the goal anyway the goal to take these tiny fragments and allow them to grow to reconnect valleys to restore the rivers which flow through them to create new homes for species that have been pushed to the edge of extinction and maybe bring back some of the species which are missing too missing and really you know restoring britain's rainforests is about the next thousand years it's about giving future generations you know something which is beautiful and widespread and really not how we see it today which is a relic if you've enjoyed this video and you haven't yet subscribed then i do encourage you to we share stories here of nature restoration and exploration the very best way of supporting the channel is by becoming a leave curious member we're doing very exciting things over there i'm working to build a platform which really does connect people like yourselves who care about nature restoration with people like merlin who are doing the work so yeah i'm i'm working on that at the minute and yeah that's linked on screen here along with the video for you to watch next but in the meantime thank you so much for watching leave curious