Exploring the effects of post-medieval crofting on the modern hillside ecosystem: Vegetation history as cultural legacy

Scottish uplands have been the focus of human activity for over 10,000 years (Guttmann et al. 2006; Wickham-Jones et al. 2020). While upland ecologies have been shaped by humans over much of this history, agricultural improvement in the late 18th and 19th centuries at the hands of crofter colonists – both legal tenants and opportunistic squatters – brought profound and previously unseen changes to the landscape. The colonists altered uplands in a variety of ways. The abiotic physical properties of soils, such as the texture, structure, and depth were permanently changed, as were biotic factors such as the seedbank, the amount and types of seed available, and the range of plant life growing on these sites. Today, many of these former smallholdings are abandoned and either lie fallow or have been turned over to forestry. With no one to maintain them, they are subject to secondary vegetation succession, the process by which new plants start to encroach onto sites, and eventually replace existing plant communities. Generally, ruderal herbaceous species appear first followed by shrubs and trees (Egler 1954; Flinn and Vellend 2005). Over time, this facilitates the replacement of earlier vegetation communities by new ones (Egler 1954). The speed and composition of emigrating species is dependent upon a variety of factors. This includes time since abandonment, the physical state of the site, climate, soil, and the presence of initial plant species (Myster 1993).