Palaeoecologists have been encouraging us to think about the relevance of the Holocene fossil record for nature conservation for many years (e.g. Buckland 1993) but this information seems slow to filter through to the conservation community. Indeed, Willis et al. (2005) report
that recently published biodiversity reports and policy documents rarely look back more than 50 years and may ignore the historical context entirely. This has been a lost opportunity for understanding ecological systems. Many natural processes occur over timescales that confound our attempts to understand them, so the vast temporal
perspective provided by palaeoecological studies
can provide important guidance for nature conservation
(Willis & Birks 2006).
However, accurate vegetation mapping is difficult enough in modern landscapes (Cherrill & McLean 1999), so the challenge of describing prehistoric environments is immeasurably greater.
Nevertheless, pioneering work in the mid 20th century showed that pollen and spores extracted from peat bogs were so perfectly preserved thatthey could be used to demonstrate sequences of vegetation change since the last glaciation
(Godwin 1956). Since then, the science has
burgeoned: ancient deposits of beetles, snails,
fungal spores and plant macrofossils add to the
picture, as does the chemistry of ancient lake sediments
(Bell & Walker 2004).
Many questions still remain to be answered by this fascinating research and one aspect has received considerable attention in the last decade.
This concerns the nature of the ‘primeval’ landscapes,
in other words our understanding of natural systems prior to significant human impact. The debate was kindled by a thesis by the Dutch forest ecologist Frans Vera in 2000 (see also Vera & Buissink 2007). Vera effectively challenged established views about the primeval landscapes and argued that the refutation, and the resulting alternative landscape models, had critical importance
for modern conservation practice.
Vera’s thesis is focused on the pre-Neolithic (ca 8000-5000bp) landscape in the lowlands of central and western Europe, with the assumption that this period represents an almost pristine or ‘natural’ state which should provide a suitable conservation benchmark. Vera contends (i) that
this landscape was not closed woodland but a relatively
open park-like mosaic of wood and grassland,and (ii) that large wild herbivores were an essential driving force behind woodland-grassland vegetation cycles. The advocacy in his argument and the timing of the publication, when grazingwas seen as increasingly important in conservation
in Europe, have combined to raise the profile
of this issue. If Vera is correct, the open park-like
landscapes were inherited rather than created by
people; this may have implications for conservation
practice in Europe.
The adoption of Vera’s ideas into conservation
management plans in the UK (see Box 1) gives an
indication of the influence that this work has had.
Indeed, Vera’s ideas have been described as a ‘challenge
to orthodox thinking’ (Miller 2002) and considerable debate has been stimulated centering
on the ecological validity of Vera’s hypothesis
and its relevance for modern conservation.
In this article, we attempt to address these issues
on the basis of results from a literature review,
web-debate and discussions with Dutch and British
ecologists, prepared for English Nature with a
view to informing conservation strategies (Hodder
& Bullock 2005a)
