JAHAMA team members hosted by Nevis Landscape Partnership

This week we had three staff from the JAHAMA Highland estates team attend a training and awareness day hosted locally by the Nevis Landscape partnership.

The event was in two parts, namely an update on the current condition of the qualifying rainforest areas of woodland in Glen Nevis , and the second a site visit into Steall gorge to help inform those attending of the need to identify and protect the last fragmented parts of our Lochaber rainforest left in the area.

Other attending organisations included the John Muir Trust, Glen Nevis Estates, the Nevis Landscape partnership, Forestry and Land Scotland and our ecology consultants Strathcaulidh limited.  There were key presentations from Dr Ollie Moore of Plantlife, ecologist Alasdair Firth, and Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest representative Gordon Grey Stephens.   Key issues highlighted were the need to continue to record and monitor the last remaining fragments of rainforest and to mitigate against the main threats to their continued existence that include being overcrowded by invasive non-native species, eaten away by herbivores, the veracity of ash die back disease and historical impacts related to previous land management uses across the area, and of course the impacts of the changing climatic conditions in Lochaber.

Many of the newly recorded lichen, mosses and bryophyte locations from our recent Rapid Rainforest Assessment can be characterised as being located higher up in the Glen, in inaccessible locations, fragmented from one another and located on mature trees with few younger trees being present to ensure their long-term survivability.  Other sites in the Glen that have fragments of rainforest species hosted on old isolated native trees, can be found close to the river Nevis.

The Jahama Highland Estates native woodland regeneration project, announced only a few weeks ago, is an important and key enabling function to help protect and restore these valuable rainforest habitats in and around Glen Nevis.  The next steps for the company are to now consider how to support the process of creating long term habitat and land use management changes that will ensure the survival and promote the recovery of these important habitats for the benefit of future generations.