Assessing the quality of plant communities in the uplands

Summary This paper describes the assessment of upland plant communities in the context of Scottish Natural Heritage's Site Condition Monitoring (SCM) programme. The quality of all notified features on all statutory designated sites will be monitored every six years, with the first national report being produced in 2005. Notified habitat features are largely defined in terms of plant communities. It is important to appreciate that plant communities are to some extent used as proxy indicators for wider interests. Upland monitoring will cover 973 specific vegetation features (grouped into just over thirty generic feature types) and 66 habitat assemblage features, spread over 223 sites and 6516 km2. Problems and solutions associated with the identification of feature boundaries, quality attributes and targets, and sampling are discussed. Three sets of assessment issues are selected for further discussion: first, appropriate species composition, and the use of direct and indirect targets; second, appropriate disturbance regimes and how this relates to naturalness and bioiversity; and third, the inclusion in monitoring of long-term progressive changes that may also be large scale. Finally, a brief summary is provided of those plant communities and processes for which, currently, monitoring can only be superficial because of insufficient information.