In Ireland, native and semi-natural woodlands dominated by native tree species occupy only a small proportion of the landscape and are highly fragmented. Recent expansion of these woodlands has been driven largely through native woodland afforestation schemes targeting different woodland habitat types according to soil and landscape context. Despite ongoing expansion of such tree-planting initiatives, systematic ecological monitoring of recently afforested native woodlands, largely established on private farmland, remains limited. This study evaluates early ecological trajectories of native woodland plantations and examines site-and landscape scale factors influencing plant community assembly and habitat development. Vegetation composition and structure were surveyed across a 20-year chronosequence of 47 native woodland plantations in agricultural landscapes of eastern and midland Ireland. Species richness was modelled to identify key environmental predictors, with patterns further elucidated through analysis of species composition and trait-environment relationships. Habitat trajectories were then assessed by comparison with National Forest Inventory reference conditions and vegetation community classification. Plant communities showed a clear temporal shift from grassland dominated assemblages to woodland vegetation with increasing stand age, shaped by landscape context. Most older stands aligned with their intended woodland vegetation communities, indicating positive restoration trajectories, while natural colonisation of native tree species increased with stand age, suggesting that tree planting does not preclude opportunities for a degree of process-driven restoration. Overall, results indicate that planted native woodlands can progress towards target woodland habitats within two decades, highlighting the potential for native afforestation on agricultural land to contribute to the expansion of biodiverse and resilient woodland networks within modified landscapes. These findings are also relevant to emerging forest and ecosystem restoration objectives under the EU Nature Restoration Law.

Evidence from observational records and model simulations suggest that volcanic eruptions can strengthen mid- to high-latitude atmospheric circulation and enhance westerly wind strength, with recent proxy data-model assimilations supporting this. However, assessments of Holocene variability in storminess rarely consider whether major volcanic eruptions could be a possible driver of reconstructed periods of enhanced storminess. This research presents a new reconstruction of past storminess from a coastal peatbog situated in western Ireland spanning the last similar to 7 ka. The record is based on the measurement of the sand content along the core, with XRF core scanning analysis also applied to test whether variations in quartz sand, shell sand and sea spray can be detected by variations in silica, calcium and bromine respectively. Ca measurements were similar to the long-term changes in sand content along the core, however, peaks in sand content were not detected, while Si reflected increases in sand content only within the last millennium when the inorganic content was highest. Br concentrations appear to have been influenced primarily by humification. We also compared sand-based storminess records from northwest Europe. Six multi-decadal to centennial periods with enhanced storminess are common to records from Ireland and Wales during the last 2.5 ka BP, centred at c. 2.25, 2, 1.4, 1.1, 0.5 and 0.2 ka BP, with less agreement between records before this time. The storm periods at 2.8, 2.2-2, 1.1 and 0.5 ka BP are more widespread events and agree with records from Sweden and Scotland. Each of the episodes of increased storminess coincide roughly with major volcanic eruptions during the late Holocene, as well as with periods of enhanced North Atlantic ice-rafting. We hypothesise, therefore, that both enhanced storminess and ice-rafting may have resulted from the climate and environmental impacts of these eruptions, aligning with the findings of recent observational and modelling studies on the climate response to eruptions. Challenges remain, however, in testing this hypothesis, given chronological uncertainties in peatland records and uncertain interpretations of the factors influencing sand deposition. Therefore, to provide an independent assessment of the influence of explosive eruptions on storminess for Ireland's northeast Atlantic position, we draw upon the rich tradition of annalistic record keeping on the island, including many reports of major storms and windy seasons, to develop a windiness index running from the sixth to seventeenth centuries CE. A set of superposed epoch analyses shows that the ice-core-based dates of explosive volcanic eruptions are statistically significantly associated with the dates of documented storms and windy seasons in Ireland, suggesting avenues for future research.

Pollinating insects are central to current EU biodiversity and restoration targets, yet their potential as indicators of biodiversity change in newly established native woodlands remains underexplored. As afforestation expands to address climate and ecological goals, selecting appropriate biodiversity metrics is critical, particularly in young plantations where traditional forest indicators may overlook early successional dynamics. This study evaluates bees and hoverflies as indicators of biodiversity change in newly planted and transitioning native woodlands in Ireland. We surveyed pollinator communities across 18 plantations using pan traps and transect walks, testing three hypotheses: (1) pollinator communities change predictably along the transition from open to closed-canopy woodland; (2) bees and hoverflies show distinct, trait-driven responses to woodland development; and (3) sampling method, timing and metric choice influence interpretations of community change. Species composition, beta diversity and interaction networks revealed clearer successional patterns than richness or abundance alone. Open habitat specialists declined with canopy closure, yet woodland specialists were slow to appear, indicating a lag between habitat development and faunal colonisation. Bees responded primarily to local habitat and floral resources, making them strong indicators of site-level woodland development, whereas hoverflies were more strongly influenced by off-site land-use patterns. Differences among metrics further shaped ecological interpretations, emphasising the need for multi-metric, methodologically consistent monitoring. Practical implication: Pollinators, particularly bees, offer sensitive and policy-relevant indicators of early woodland development, supporting the design of effective biodiversity monitoring frameworks for native afforestation and aligning directly with the evidence requirements of the EU Nature Restoration Law.

1. Wild pollinators are crucial for ecosystem functioning and human food production and often rely on floral resources provided by different (semi-) natural ecosystems for survival. Yet, the role of European forests, and especially the European forest herb layer, as a potential provider of floral resources for pollinators has scarcely been quantified. 2. In this study, we measured the potential nectar production (PNP) of the forest herb layer using resurvey data across 3326 plots in temperate forests in Europe, with an average time interval of 41 years between both surveys in order to assess (i) the importance of the forest herb layer in providing nectar for wild pollinators, (ii) the intra-annual variation of PNP, (iii) the overall change in PNP between survey periods and (iv) the change in intra-annual variation of PNP between sur-vey periods. The PNP estimates nectar availability based on the relative cover of different plant species in the forest herb layer. Although PNP overestimates actual nectar production, relative differences amongst plots provide a valid and informative way to analyse differences across time and space. 3. Our results show that the forest herb layer has a large potential for providing nec-tar for wild pollinator communities, which is greatest in spring, with an average PNP of almost 16 g sugar/m2/year. However, this potential has drastically declined (mean plot- level decline >24%). 4. Change in light availability, associated with shifts in canopy structure and canopy composition, is the key driver of temporal PNP changes. 5. Synthesis. Our study shows that if management activities are carefully planned to sustain nectar- producing plant species for wild pollinators, European forest herb layers and European forests as a whole can play key roles in sustaining wild pol-linator populations.

Plant communities are being exposed to changing environmental conditions all around the globe, leading to alterations in plant diversity, community composition, and ecosystem functioning. For herbaceous understorey communities in temperate forests, responses to global change are postulated to be complex, due to the presence of a tree layer that modulates understorey responses to external pressures such as climate change and changes in atmospheric nitrogen deposition rates. Multiple investigative approaches have been put forward as tools to detect, quantify and predict understorey responses to these global-change drivers, including, among others, distributed resurvey studies and manipulative experiments. These investigative approaches are generally designed and reported upon in isolation, while integration across investigative approaches is rarely considered. In this study, we integrate three investigative approaches (two complementary resurvey approaches and one experimental approach) to investigate how climate warming and changes in nitrogen deposition affect the functional composition of the understorey and how functional responses in the understorey are modulated by canopy disturbance, that is, changes in overstorey canopy openness over time. Our resurvey data reveal that most changes in understorey functional characteristics represent responses to changes in canopy openness with shifts in macroclimate temperature and aerial nitrogen deposition playing secondary roles. Contrary to expectations, we found little evidence that these drivers interact. In addition, experimental findings deviated from the observational findings, suggesting that the forces driving understorey change at the regional scale differ from those driving change at the forest floor (i.e., the experimental treatments). Our study demonstrates that different approaches need to be integrated to acquire a full picture of how understorey communities respond to global change.

HoStIr is a palaeoclimate research project investigating how and why storminess has changed throughout the Holocene in Ireland. The project has three stages: 1) testing of proxies for storminess, 2) development of three Holocene storm reconstructions for Ireland, and 3) a data-model comparison of past storminess. Here, we present the preliminary results of the first stage of the project, where we are testing two potential indicators of past sea spray deposition in coastal peatlands. Past storminess has primarily been investigated using sand-based proxies deposited by wind or waves into coastal depositional environments. By testing proxies related to the deposition of sea spray during storms, it is anticipated that storminess reconstructions can be developed from a wider range of sites. The first potential proxy is preserved bromine within peat, which potentially reflects the deposition and retention of sea salt. The second is the biomass of microscopic testate amoebae preserved in peat, as a previous study from the sub-Antarctic suggests this can be influenced by changing salinity as a result of sea spray (Whittle et al. 2019). Thirty cores have been sampled along a transect from a coastal peatland on the west coast of Ireland, spanning a gradient of marine influence. We will present preliminary results of the bromine retention along this transect, measured using XRF analysis and with tephrochronology used for age control, as well as the results of the testate amoebae biomass. Bromine concentrations along two cores has also been assessed by ITRAX (X-Ray Fluorescence) core scanning and compared with humification analysis, to test the possibility that bromine concentrations are influenced by the degree of peat humification. Analyses of this and the remaining project stages is ongoing. It is anticipated that this first stage, if successful, will provide a methodological breakthrough by proving that peatland sea-spray proxies provide reliable evidence for past storminess and would enable storminess records to be developed more extensively than sand-based approaches alone. Whittle, A. et al. (2019) ‘Salt-Enrichment Impact on Biomass Production in a Natural Population of Peatland Dwelling Arcellinida and Euglyphida (Testate Amoebae)’, Microbial Ecology, 78, pp. 534–538.

Northern peatlands store globally-important amounts of carbon in the form of partly decomposed plant detritus. Drying associated with climate and land-use change may lead to increased fire frequency and severity in peatlands and the rapid loss of carbon to the atmosphere. However, our understanding of the patterns and drivers of peatland burning on an appropriate decadal to millennial timescale relies heavily on individual site-based reconstructions. For the first time, we synthesise peatland macrocharcoal re-cords from across North America, Europe, and Patagonia to reveal regional variation in peatland burning during the Holocene. We used an existing database of proximal sedimentary charcoal to represent regional burning trends in the wider landscape for each region. Long-term trends in peatland burning appear to be largely climate driven, with human activities likely having an increasing influence in the late Holocene. Warmer conditions during the Holocene Thermal Maximum (similar to 9e6 cal. ka BP) were associated with greater peatland burning in North America's Atlantic coast, southern Scandinavia and the Baltics, and Patagonia. Since the Little Ice Age, peatland burning has declined across North America and in some areas of Europe. This decline is mirrored by a decrease in wider landscape burning in some, but not all sub-regions, linked to fire-suppression policies, and landscape fragmentation caused by agricultural expansion. Peatlands demonstrate lower susceptibility to burning than the wider landscape in several instances, probably because of autogenic processes that maintain high levels of near-surface wetness even during drought. Nonetheless, widespread drying and degradation of peatlands, particularly in Europe, has likely increased their vulnerability to burning in recent centuries. Consequently, peatland restoration efforts are important to mitigate the risk of peatland fire under a changing climate. Finally, we make recommendations for future research to improve our understanding of the controls on peatland fires.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Climate change is allowing fire to expand into previously unburnt ecosystems and regions. While management policies such as fire suppression have significantly altered their frequency and intensity. To prevent future biodiversity/ecosystem services loss, and the large financial burden of wildfires, management plans will be required to adapt to future climate and land use changes. Long-term ecological data offer a unique perspective to assess fire variability under different climate and land-use conditions. In this study, we focus on Killarney National Park, Ireland. An area which today is under threat from an increase in fire activity. Comparing palaeoecological and archaeological records, we reconstruct the past fire dynamic and its impact on the landscape, and evaluate the role of climate vs humans in influencing the natural fire regime over the millennial time-scale. Our results indicate that fire has been present in the landscape since the beginning of the Holocene, with fire in the early Holocene being largely controlled by climate and microsite conditions, and in the late Holocene being increasingly influenced by human activity. The knowledge of past fire regimes can help inform future management in order to protect the semi-natural native woodland. The park's present landscape mosaic, could be preserved by limiting forest encroachment through moderate grazing and burning, while also protecting any fragmented forest from excessive grazing and large/intense fires, via traditional fire management strategies such as fuel load management. However, a fire management strategy should only be implemented following careful consideration of all ecosystem factors and controls.

Floodplain vegetation is rare in southern Thailand due to the generally steep gradient through which major rivers flow and high pressure of land use. This study aims to increase the understanding of factors and processes that govern vegetation variation and diversity in a floodplain to provide information for conservation and manage-ment of this threatened and rare ecosystem. A total of 20 plots, each 625 m(2), were laid on three broad categories of fluvial landforms to collect data on the number of tree species (woody plants with diameter at breast height (DBH) >= 5 cm), soil variables, flooding, history of land use and distance to the inner curve of the channel in Nong thung thong Non-Hunting Area, Thailand. Three 4 m(2) subplots were nested within each 625 m(2) plot to estimate shrub composition and coverage. The alpha and beta diversity of the tree species in each fluvial landform were calculated. The relationships between vegetation data and environmental factors were explored through transformation-based Redundancy Analysis (tb-RDA) and univariate analyses. Beta diversity between abandoned channel and ridge plots, and between ridge and shallow depression plots was higher than the dissimilarities within each fluvial landform, and the balanced variation in abundance contributed to the major part of the dissimilarities. These results indicate different tolerance ranges or competitive ability of species between these fluvial landforms. Results from the tb-RDA showed that tree species composition varied with fluvial landforms and soil calcium content. Median of flooding was associated with fluvial landforms. In addition, soil calcium content could be controlled by fluvial landform because clay and calcium were correlated, and both were associated with fluvial landforms. These results suggest that variation in fluvial landforms causes variation in flooding duration, edaphic factors, vegetation variation, and ultimately, the biodiversity in this floodplain.

The threat of devastating pathogens on a range of tree species has increased recently, which justifies the investigation of the temporal dynamics of tree declines caused by disease. The mid-Holocene Elm Decline was a widespread and synchronous event recorded in pollen diagrams across northwest Europe. The probable drivers of this event have been debated for over 80years but the role of disease has gathered greatest support in recent decades. Here we report pollen data at sub-decadal resolution from a closely sampled sediment core from eastern Ireland covering the last 160years. This provides data on the structure and dynamics of the surrounding woodland before, during and after the outbreak of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s. A decline in elm was also recorded in the 1940s associated with an earlier, less virulent, outbreak of elm disease. The elm population recovered from the 1940s outbreak after 20years but did not recover from the 1970s pandemic. The pollen data also facilitate the comparison of this disease-mediated decline with the mid-Holocene Elm Decline; the impact of human disturbance and disease resulted in different woodland compositions and the adjustment of the woodland in response to these factors was rapid. The impact of Dutch elm disease on this elm 1970s population was very similar to that recorded in the mid-Holocene Elm Decline in Britain and Ireland.

Aggregation of the bean flower thrips, Megalurothrips sjostedti (Trybom) (Thysanoptera: Thripidae), has been observed on cowpea, Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp. To understand the mechanism underpinning this behavior, we studied the responses of M. sjostedti to headspace volatiles from conspecifics in a four-arm olfactometer. Both male and female M. sjostedti were attracted to male, but not to female odor. Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analyses revealed the presence of two distinct compounds in male M. sjostedti headspace, namely ( R )-lavandulyl 3-methylbutanoate (major compound) and ( R )-lavandulol (minor compound); by contrast, both compounds were only present in trace amounts in female headspace collections. A behavioral assay using synthetic compounds showed that male M. sjostedti was attracted to both ( R )-lavandulyl 3-methylbutanoate and ( R )-lavandulol, while females responded only to ( R )-lavandulyl 3-methylbutanoate. This is the first report of a male-produced aggregation pheromone in the genus Megalurothrips . The bean flower thrips is the primary pest of cowpea, which is widely grown in sub-Saharan Africa. The attraction of male and female M. sjostedti to these compounds offers an opportunity to develop ecologically sustainable management methods for M. sjostedti in Africa.

Lake sediment core sampling at Cuckoo Lough, Killarney.

Peatlands are a major terrestrial carbon store and a persistent natural carbon sink during the Holocene, but there is considerable uncertainty over the fate of peatland carbon in a changing climate. It is generally assumed that higher temperatures will increase peat decay, causing a positive feedback to climate warming and contributing to the global positive carbon cycle feedback. Here we use a new extensive database of peat profiles across northern high latitudes to examine spatial and temporal patterns of carbon accumulation over the past millennium. Opposite to expectations, our results indicate a small negative carbon cycle feedback from past changes in the long-term accumulation rates of northern peatlands. Total carbon accumulated over the last 1000 yr is linearly related to contemporary growing season length and photosynthetically active radiation, suggesting that variability in net primary productivity is more important than decomposition in determining long-term carbon accumulation. Furthermore, northern peatland carbon sequestration rate declined over the climate transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) to the Little Ice Age (LIA), probably because of lower LIA temperatures combined with increased cloudiness suppressing net primary productivity. Other factors including changing moisture status, peatland distribution, fire, nitrogen deposition, permafrost thaw and methane emissions will also influence future peatland carbon cycle feedbacks, but our data suggest that the carbon sequestration rate could increase over many areas of northern peatlands in a warmer future.

The carbon sink potential of peatlands depends on the balance of carbon uptake by plants and microbial decomposition. The rates of both these processes will increase with warming but it remains unclear which will dominate the global peatland response. Here we examine the global relationship between peatland carbon accumulation rates during the last millennium and planetary-scale climate space. A positive relationship is found between carbon accumulation and cumulative photosynthetically active radiation during the growing season for mid- to high-latitude peatlands in both hemispheres. However, this relationship reverses at lower latitudes, suggesting that carbon accumulation is lower under the warmest climate regimes. Projections under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP)2.6 and RCP8.5 scenarios indicate that the present-day global sink will increase slightly until around ad 2100 but decline thereafter. Peatlands will remain a carbon sink in the future, but their response to warming switches from a negative to a positive climate feedback (decreased carbon sink with warming) at the end of the twenty-first century.

Patterns of habitat use by animals and knowledge of the environmental factors affecting these spatial patterns are important for understanding the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. Both aspects are poorly known for deep-sea habitats. The present study investigates echinoid distributions within cold water coral (CWC) habitats on continental margins off France, Australia, and New Zealand. It further examines the influence of habitat-related variables that might help explain the observed distribution of echinoid taxa. Six echinoid taxa were examined from video and photographic transects to reveal taxon-specific distribution patterns and habitat-related influences. The Echinoidea were found in all habitats studied, but tended to aggregate in architecturally complex habitats associated with living cold-water corals. However, a taxon-specific investigation found that such associations were largely an artefact of the dominant taxa observed in a specific region. Despite the food and shelter resources offered to echinoids by matrix-forming coral habitats, not all taxa were associated with these habitats, and some had a random association with the habitats examined, while others displayed non-random associations. Echinoid distribution was correlated with several variables; the presence of other echinoids, depth, and fishing history were the most influential factors. This study indicates that image data can be a useful tool to detect trends in echinoid habitat associations. It also suggests that refinement of the methods, in particular with studies conducted at a more precise taxon and habitat scale, would facilitate better quantitative analyses of habitat associations and paint a more realistic picture of a population's ecology. Most deep-sea ecological studies to date have been conducted at a relatively coarse taxonomic and habitat resolution, and lack sufficient resolution to provide useful information for the conservation of vulnerable deep-sea habitats.

Investigation of abrupt palaeohydrological regime change remains challenging due to site-specific noise ratios and the limitations of dating control and spatial resolution of multi-proxy records. Some of these issues are addressed through a well dated and highly resolved record from an ombrotrophic peatland in Galicia, north-west Spain. The site is in an ideal location to record marine influences and test models of past palaeoclimatic boundaries and ocean-atmosphere linkages through multi-proxy records of macrofossils, microfossils, charcoal, peat humification and loss-on-ignition data. In conjunction with many regional proxy records of terrestrial and marine origin, the data suggest spatial coherence between 5300 and ca. 3300 cal. BP and continue to link to marine responses afterwards. After ca. 2000 cal. BP, episodes of spatially consistent palaeohydrological change persist but become more short-lived, local and sporadic in north-west Iberia. These indicate an increase in the complexity of drivers of palaeoenvironmental change in recent millennia. Fire history inferred from microscopic charcoal and apparent upland erosion indicated by the loss-on-ignition profile relate to anthropogenic pressure and appear to be linked to local deforestation phases in the Xistral uplands.

The dynamics of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) in Europe during the Holocene have been spatially and temporally complex. The species underwent extirpation and reintroduction in several north-west European countries. This study investigated the late Holocene vegetation history of a present-day pinewood in western Ireland, to test the widely accepted hypothesis that P. sylvestris became extinct in Ireland c. AD 400. Palaeoecological, chronological and loss-on-ignition analyses were conducted on a sediment core extracted from an adjacent lake. The pollen profile showed no major Pinus decline and a Pinus macrofossil occurred c. AD 840, indicating localised survival of P. sylvestris from c. AD 350 to the present. The available archival maps and historical literature provide supporting evidence for continuity of forest cover. The hypothesis that P. sylvestris became extinct in Ireland is rejected. The implications for ecological management are significant. We argue that P. sylvestris should be considered native to Ireland, at least at this site. As Ireland's only putative native P. sylvestris population and the western limit of the species' native range, this site is of high conservation value and must be carefully managed and monitored. Seed-sourcing for ex-situ forest restoration must be compatible with the long-term viability of the population in-situ.

Ireland has good coverage of late Quaternary pollen sites but they are concentrated in the west and north. This paper presents the first full late-glacial and Holocene record from eastern Leinster. It charts vegetation development over the last 15,000 years in the Glendalough Valley. Late-glacial vegetation development shows close correlation to western sites and sampling resolution is sufficient to register short but significant deviations in the pollen record. Anthropogenic impact on the landscape is not evident until the late Neolithic (c. 5,400 cal BP), which contrasts with earlier activity in the west and north which was followed by a lull. This geographical difference in anthropogenic activity may have been influenced by an east-west precipitation gradient. Once established, anthropogenic activity continued to have an increasing influence on the landscape. The establishment of an early Christian monastic site followed by iron smelting in the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries and then lead mining in the nineteenth century had significant impacts on the vegetation.This work provides useful context for the contemporary vegetation communities in the Glendalough valley which currently forms the core of the Wicklow Mountains National Park.