What Wetland are We Protecting and Restoring? Quantifying the Human Creation of Protected Areas in Scotland

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an archaeological perspective of modified lacustrine environments in Scotland currently designated as protected areas for biodiversity. After introducing how ‘natural’ is embedded in biodiversity protection and restoration, an approach to archaeologically assess the anthropogenic creation of protected biodiversity is laid out using an existing dataset on historic drainage of Scottish lochs. This approach is one way to quantify the degree to which valued and protected wetland habitats are products of human activity, specifically drainage. Where this is the case, wetland archaeology of historic drainage can improve management and habitat restoration through articulating processes of shifting ecological baselines and defining natural states in environments. This is explored with a case study and argued to support novel ecosystems frameworks for protected areas and restoration. With this view, a model is proposed for how wetland archaeology can improve wetland restoration while reducing possible conflicts with the preservation of wetland archaeology.

KEYWORDS:

• Protected areas
• natural
• novel ecosystems
• historic land-use change
• drainage
• wetland restoration
• habitat management
• Scotland

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Centre – the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, and I thank my colleagues in the Centre for their useful thoughts on this paper. The paper was presented at EAA Kiel 2021, 9 September 2021, Session #219 ‘The Historical Ecology of Reclamation Landscapes: Towards a cross-cultural comparative perspective’, and I thank the session participants for their input and helpful comments. Thanks also to Dr Claire Christie who made helpful suggestion on an early draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The Roy Military Survey of Scotland data used in this paper is available in Stratigos (2016a) <https://doi.org/10.1080/14732971.2016.1248129>. Data on habitat and condition for Scottish Sites of Special Scientific Interest are available from <https://sitelink.nature.scot/home> and boundary data for Scottish Sites of Special Scientific Interest are available from<https://gateway.snh.gov.uk/natural-spaces>.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Centre – the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity.