Why people rally around a rainforest – in England

Stepping across the threshold, it is as though you’re entering another world. 

Beneath the canopy of great oak trees, different from those you might normally find in an English woodland, ferns unfurl their fronds amid a smattering of wildflowers. A brook murmurs across well-worn rocks. Time seems to slow, and you could be forgiven for imagining you’ve awoken in a scene from The Lord of the Rings.

In fact, these temperate rainforests were a deep source of inspiration for author J.R.R. Tolkien, among others. But it is only recently that their significance has started to gain wide recognition, and efforts are now afoot to save what slivers remain, not only here in the United Kingdom, but in all parts of the world where they still exist.

“Whether it’s Game of Thrones and a reference to all those misty rainforest scenes, or the knights of King Arthur, traveling through forests dripping with lichen, they really are a part of our cultural heritage,” says Rob Stoneman, director of landscape recovery at The  Wildlife Trusts, an umbrella organization for 46 charities throughout the United Kingdom promoting the protection and restoration of nature. “And yet there’s really hardly any left.”

Fully 20% of Britain’s land surface is thought to host the right kind of climate for temperate rainforest, and yet a mere 1% is actually still covered by this luxuriant habitat. That statistic is perhaps less surprising when seen in the context of this country being one of the most nature-depleted on the planet, having experienced centuries of logging, development, and conversion to other land uses. 

But the importance of these woods stretches far beyond nostalgia and a connection with the myths and legends that pervade the past. Globally, they also represent a key pillar in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss. 

The steaming jungles of the tropics are what most people’s minds turn to when they hear the term “rainforest,” and the importance of those ecosystems merits their prominence in the popular psyche, with more than half of all species on Earth estimated to live within their bounds. Yet temperate rainforests harbor their own kind of unique biodiversity. 

Perhaps most important is their bewildering array of lichens and mosses, ranging from the visually astonishing string-of-sausages lichen, with its intricate draping branches, to the internationally important, like the white script lichen, found nowhere on the planet outside of Scotland’s rainforests.

And on at least some measures, temperate rainforests may even outmatch their tropical counterparts in importance.

“Often we talk about the value of trees in terms of their carbon storage,” says Eleanor Lewis, outreach manager for the Woodland Trust in southwest England, “but temperate rainforests have almost a double whammy: They don’t just have carbon stored in the trees themselves, but because of all the epiphytic growth, these other plants living on the trees are also storing carbon, so you have an increased impact.”

You will see trees coated with mosses and lichens, often to the extent that the bark beneath is barely perceptible. Ferns appear to erupt from the branches – and even, on occasion, you can spot a sapling of one tree species apparently emerging from the upper reaches of another. All of these are epiphytes, plants that use the structure of others to support themselves.

And it is not just in this profusion of growth that temperate rainforests may trump the tropics. Whereas the soils of tropical rainforests are often nutrient-poor, those in more temperate climes tend to have thick, dark soils, rich in nutrients and organic matter. 

Because of this, in terms of their carbon storage capacity, “on a hectare-by-hectare basis [tropical rainforests] pale in comparison to the world’s temperate and boreal rainforests,” says Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a California-based nonprofit that works to protect primary forests – areas that have been mostly undisturbed by logging.

“I think we really need to scale up the level of protection and restoration in these areas, otherwise we have so much to lose,” says Dr. DellaSala, who also compiled the 2011 book, Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World. “And yet I’m still hopeful that there’s enough time to do this before we start to really get to the point of accumulating catastrophic climate and biodiversity losses.”

Indeed, there are bright spots. The Tongass National Forest in Alaska, for example, is billed by some as the world’s largest remaining intact temperate rainforest, spanning some 17 million acres. The vast majority of the original trees have escaped the chainsaw, and there are efforts afoot to transition away from any logging of the primary forest. 

In Scotland, home to one of the last significant bastions of a kind of temperate rainforest that once blanketed the Atlantic coasts of Europe, organizations came together in recent years to create the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest, aiming to see the habitat thrive again. A similar group – the South West Rainforest Alliance – sprang up in March to protect and expand pockets of temperate rainforest remaining in English counties such as Cornwall and Devon.

Throughout the whole of Britain, another promising sign is £38 million (about $48.4 million) in recent funding from Aviva, the insurance company, as part of its carbon reduction strategy. This money is being given to The Wildlife Trusts specifically to establish new areas of temperate rainforest.

This idea of establishing new tracts of rainforest is one part of a three-pronged strategy being adopted to tackle the decline of these crucial ecosystems, according to Ms. Lewis of the Woodland Trust. The other steps are to tackle the threats that face existing forests: both directly, and by means of advocacy to bolster their legal protections.

“Ultimately, protecting what we’ve already got, and restoring it to make sure it’s in the best condition possible, is absolutely crucial,” Ms. Lewis says.

One of the most pernicious problems is overgrazing, often by sheep or cows, which prevents the emergence of any fresh saplings, either to replace trees that fall due to natural causes, or indeed to allow a rainforest to start spreading outward. To tackle this, exclosures can be erected, delineating areas where the livestock cannot tread, usually by erecting physical barriers. 

Yet under-grazing can also be troublesome, enabling certain plants to thrive and crowd others out. So some groups are using GPS-enabled collars, which deliver a series of audible notes, increasing in pitch, as an animal approaches a pre-defined virtual fence – and a mild electric shock, similar to that delivered by an electric fence, if the threshold is reached. A mobile app enables boundaries to be redefined easily to adjust the grazing intensity and duration for any given area. 

Another deep-rooted problem that is already being widely tackled is that of invasive species, perhaps none more troublesome than the rhododendron. Efforts are afoot in many areas – such as projects in Wales managed by Celtic Rainforests – to deal with the non-native plants.

And then, there is climate change. Temperate rainforests are defined by certain characteristics, most notably being persistently sodden places. But if that changes, say, to a climate where the rainfall is compressed into winter deluges, followed by hot, dry summers, it is unclear whether these delicate ecosystems could survive.

On that issue, hopes appear to hinge largely on global efforts underway to stabilize temperatures by curbing emissions of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere. 

“These woodlands, they’re our natural heritage,” says Thomas Murphy, an environmental scientist at the University of Plymouth, whose research focuses on native woodland restoration. “The more we think about us being part of the planet rather than just a species that exists alongside nature, the more we should appreciate that these places are our resources. For many thousands of years our ancestors really valued these woodlands.”

Editor's note: A sentence about the Tongass National Forest has been updated to allow for the fact that there are varying definitions of the largest temperate rainforests.