Under the microscope
Dr Scott Davidson has been working with colleagues worldwide to improve understanding of our wetlands, and to change the public perception of them
A couple of years ago,
Dr Scott Davidson put together a lecture for his environmental science students. In it, he highlighted how the entertainment industry hasn’t been kind to wetland landscapes. Where woodland glades are bathed in ethereal light to conjure visions of blissful tranquillity, or moorlands are portrayed as having a remote but striking beauty, wetlands are positioned somewhere between menacing and downright terrifying.
Think of The Swamp of Sadness. The Dead Marshes. The Fire Swamp. The Bog of Eternal Stench. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, corpses shift beneath the waters and hypnotise a helpless Frodo Baggins. In The NeverEnding Story, the death of the heroic horse Artax became the stuff of many a childhood nightmare.
“There is so much negativity around wetlands that people can be scared of them,” says Scott, a lecturer in Ecosystem Resilience within the
School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences .
“Society might slowly be realising that these landscapes are among our best solutions to fight climate change. But there still needs to be a tidal shift in public opinion.”
It’s a relatively fresh January day and Scott is at one of his wet woodland field sites. It’s a location passed each day by tens of thousands of people. The sounds of the A30 trunk route, the main rail line to Penzance, the flight path into Newquay Airport are clear to hear.
But most people will never see this pocket of Cornwall at such close quarters.
Around us, willow trees emerge from still pools of water as far as the eye can see. Carpets of sphagnum lie semi-submerged, working hidden magic to turn the land beneath them into peat. Look even closer, and you see moss and lichen adorning every branch. There is even the stems of a blueberry plant which, Scott says, bore fruit the previous summer.
As we discuss the landscape before us, the sun rises and breaks through the branches. The reflections on the water and how they illuminate this forest are nothing short of spectacular. There is a scent in the air but it’s not harsh on the nostrils. Menacing, this is certainly not. I have an idea in my head that, apart from the gravel tracks we have walked along to reach this spot, this parcel of land has probably lain unspoilt for millennia.
“This whole area played a part in the tin industry until the 1960s,” Scott corrects me, as he stands almost knee deep in one of the woodland pools. “Everything you see here today has grown since then. It’s a great example of how we can restore landscapes that some might think have been degraded beyond repair.”
Scott and PhD student
Emma Duley are working on the Goss Moor site, managed by Natural England, to understand its contribution to the carbon cycle. They are examining whether certain locations, or particular species, serve as carbon sources or carbon sinks. It is research that has the potential to inspire other conservation programmes in the UK and worldwide.
It doesn’t take much talking to Scott to realise he is obsessed with wetlands. He has no qualms admitting as such. He has spent the past decade or so examining sites in Canada, the UK, Sweden and elsewhere all over the world. In fact, on the day we meet in Cornwall, he is still getting over the jetlag from a recent research trip to Australia.
“Here in the UK, we have around 90,000 hectares of wet woodland,” he says. “That may sound a lot but in terms of the land area of the country, it really isn’t. What we have here is so much different to what you’d find elsewhere, which is why most people see a space that they believe has no value. If we can change how we feel about wetlands, we can do so much more to protect them.”
Scott is committed to sharing his passion with others. He often brings samples from his research sites into his lectures – his “bog in a bucket” – where they can be examined and enjoyed by his students. He also runs an international citizen science project – Tracking the Colour of Peatlands – where he encourages people to get out into wetlands around the world and track the changes happening for themselves.
Of 16 sites all over the world, one is just inside the entrance to the world-famous Eden Project. A narrow path from one of the main car parks leads to a small raised platform. Next to it is a post topped with a metal cradle the size of a smartphone. The idea is that through the simple act of taking a picture, and then emailing it to Scott, people are contributing to his research. But the results have gone far beyond that.
People email me a photo with details of what they’ve done that day, or they say how happy they are to have contributed to science. I hope that by changing people’s opinion on peatlands, we can get them to appreciate these sites – and what they can offer our planet – just as much as I do.
