Strath Caulaidh - Informed Ecological Decisions

Commercial Projects

Strath Caulaidh has been trading since 1998 and has carried out a wide range of projects for a diverse range of commercial clients in the UK and Eire. Our clients include commercial forestry companies, government conservation agencies and renewable energy developers.

One long-term commercial project required us to develop new methods of estimating deer abundance in woodlands for Forest Enterprise Scotland (Case Study 1). This major study has resulted in our methods now being used in most of the forests owned by the Forestry Commission in Scotland.

A major project for ScottishPower relates to the vegetative re-colonisation of land deforested to build windfarms (Case Study 2). A network of study sites is currently being monitored to establish how quickly different types of vegetation, particularly blanket bog vegetation, recover after commercial tree crops are felled.

DSCF0502 - Kennet Pans CROPPED_1.JPG A recent new project involves us monitoring the rate of establishment of new mudflat and saltmarsh habitat at the new Kincardine Bridge for MVJV (Case Study 3). The focus on this project is ensuring that marine invertebrates colonise newly-accreting estuarine sediments and that specialist coastal vegetation colonises re-instated land adjacent to the construction site.

We are also involved in a major project with ScottishPower, developing an extranet site to host a large body of data gathered on windfarm sites to demonstrate compliance with planning conditions (Case Study 4). This online resource was developed last year for one of SP's major development sites and is now being rolled out to include a considerable number of other windfarms.

Other current projects with Forest Enterprise Scotland include the prediction of deer impact levels on commercial forest crops, the development of best practice approaches for quantifying habitat impacts in the uplands and deer culling rates in woodlands, quantifying the impacts of hill cattle on upland vegetation and quantifying the effects of mechanical cutting on heather moorland structure.

A number of other large projects are also underway with ScottishPower. One study relates to the restoration of a blanket bog at Black Law windfarm damaged by drainage for commercial forestry and livestock grazing. This project involves building a 3-dimensional model of the bog and drainage network to establish where drain damming would most effectively raise the artificially lowered water level. We are working on a considerable number of other windfarm sites investigating variuous aspects of blanket bog ecology and hydrology. Other projects include creating 2 new native woodlands, monitoring water vole populations, monitoring the re-instatement of an old open cast coal mine and assessing the abundance of Golden eagle prey in Argyll.

We also offer a range of services to other clients who include Coillte Teo (The Irish Forestry Board), The University of Edinburgh, Scottish Natural Heritage and most recently private Highland estates including Glenfeshie and North Affric. Please contact us for further details of the services we provide.



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