Oh, dear! What can the Machair be?
The Glasgow Naturalist 25 (Supplement): 3-10.
Abstract:
The machair is a mosaic of different habitats – beach, sand dunes, dune slacks, pasture, marshes, ditches and lochs. Indeed to explain their relationship to one another and to the wildlife that inhabits them it is more convenient to think of ‘machair’ as a system, one that conspires to create and maintain the landscape that we celebrate today. Geography, geology, geomorphological processes, climate, plants (in the form of seaweed, marram etc ) and animals (molluscs and other calcium-rich marine creatures) all contributed to a habitat mosaic that was to prove so attractive to wildlife. A few thousand years ago humans arrived to populate and work this land . The unique husbandry they came to develop was not only sympathetic to and driven by the local environmental conditions but also, as it happened, served to enrich the biodiversity of the machair. It is only in recent decades that conservationists have come to appreciate this resource and how they must work with the local crofters to retain this biodiversity. But the older generation admit that the wildlife is not as good as it once was. Global climate change, agricultural innovation, and the demands of modern living are now all conspiring to accelarate the erosion of this beautiful, low-intensity land use system, and indeed towards the erosion of the very machair itself.
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