Talk:Heath (habitat)

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Not really much of a contribution, but does anyone else notice a striking similarity between Devon and South Africa in the photos? M. Lloyd, 17:30 4/2/08

this is rather euro-centric habitat speak, its not wrong but..., what about related habitats around the world, Fynbos in southern Africa, the spectacular Kwongan in Western Australia, 'heathlands' in Eastern Australia, the vast buttongrass moorlands in Tasmania, the heavy metal heaths of New Caledonia to name a few —Preceding unsigned comment added by Meika (talk • contribs) 02:55, 19 August 2005

- Good point, I see Western Tasmania is mentioned already - I'll add these other similar areas to the bottom of the page (4wd 00:42, 25 May 2006 (UTC))

Contents 1 Split this page? 2 Burning of Moorland 3 Management 4 What a horribly Eurocentric page 5 Split 6 Fire regime 7 Do plants make a heath a heath? 8 Photos

[edit] Split this page?

How much do heaths and moors really have in common? My impression as a non-specialist is that they're very different kinds of environment, and shouldn't be lumped together in one article. That said, if the page is to be split it really needs a lot more information to avoid ending up with two stubs. Blisco 18:21, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Burning of Moorland

According to new scientist, burning of moors to encourage the growth of heather is significantly contributing to the UK's CO2 output. It's even got a journal reference we can use. But I'm not sure how to work this into the article. LinaMishima 16:16, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

A start would be to have a paragraph on use and management of moorland, mentioning regular burning. This exemplifies my point above that a lot more information is needed. --Blisco 14:53, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

How can this be true unless the underlying peat was burned? The CO2 could only have been incorporated into the woody material from the atmosphere over the last few years - effectively neutral balance. Burning is essential as it keeps down the mass of dry material which can become a destructive wildfire in the Summer these hot fires are more likely to involve the peat below. Also the seeds of Ling require the brief heat to germinate. Moorland has developed in association with regular burning for millenia, stopping the practice will inevitably have undesireable consequences considering the relative rarity of the habitat globally.

I feel the Global Warming CO2 issue is entirely irrelevant in this article however a section highlighting the necessity of periodic burning to maintain the heather in good condition should perhaps be included4wd 22:55, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I've added a suggested split notice, as I feel a new article would encourage the addition of information like this. Of course, a lot of work would be necessary to fix all the piped links like [[heath (habitat)|moorland]]. --Blisco 08:59, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps for a start a new heading might be made in the article. I'll insert the following and welcome any additions. 4wd 21:57, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Management

Moorland and Heath is largely a man-made habitat which would slowly revert to other types of vegetation such as [Woodland] were it not for scrub and saplings being periodically removed, usually by [controlled burning].

Mechanical cutting of the heather has been used, but it is important the material is removed to avoid smothering regrowth. It has been found that heather seeds germinate better if subject to the brief heat of controlled burning.

If the heather and other vegetation is left for too long, a large volume of dry and combustible material builds up. This is likely to cause a Summer wildfire which may burn out a large area including the underlying peat and is much hotter than a controlled burn. Little wildlife can survive such a major fire. 4wd 21:57, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What a horribly Eurocentric page

Seriously, the entire page talks exclusively about European heathlands. Yet European heathlands comprise maybe 1% of the world's heaths, and less than 1/1000th of a percent of the biodiversity. It's as though someone wrote an article about rainforests and mentioned only the Pacific Northwest while overlooking the Amazon, Congo, Indo-Malaya etc. It really is that bad. While doubtless very good for an article on European heaths the whole article is a joke if it is intended as a reference on heaths generally.

Numerous comments are simply wrong, such as claims that the largest heaths are found in Germany. That's funny when you consider that you could probably fit the whole of West Germany into the Australian heathlands. The whole page needs a major re-write. Much of the Europe specific material needs to be removed, we simply don't have room for it if we wish to avoid European bias. There's no justification in adding a complete list of European heathland vertebrate fauna if we aren't also going to list the 100 or so Australian species, and a further 200 or so from South America, and so on and so forth. Either we list them all or we list none. My vote is that we list none, or maybe one "typical" example form each major region.

The claims that all heathlands are anthropogenic is just nonsense. The Australian and Southern African heathlands existed for millions of years. before humans even evolved.

Ultimately the article is totally inaccurate because it speaks as European heaths were the only heaths on earth, rather than just a very tiny, almost negligible speck in one corner. It needs a serious re-write, which I might get around to one day.

This is just a heads up so that if anyone comes back and finds all the Europe specific stuff deleted you know why. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 211.29.68.206 (talk • contribs) 09:09, September 8, 2006 (UTC)

STOP - Reference! Whilst the changes you made are actually rather good, all this hassle would have been avoided if the article had been properly referenced in the first place. before adding anything else, I advise that references are found. LinaMishima 14:27, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Split

Right, I've moved the information on moorland to a separate article where it belongs; hopefully both articles can now get the serious attention they deserve. People who know about the subject, please tidy up as appropriate! I removed the sentence beginning Until recently, modern techniques of agriculture threatened some of this habitat because it didn't seem to fit with anything else and I had a feeling it was over-simplistic and possibly inaccurate (as well as perhaps being more relevant to moorland), but feel free to put it back and expand. --Blisco 18:47, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fire regime

I am having trouble understanding this sentence in the opening section:

Heaths form extensive and highly diverse communities across Australia in all humid and sub-humid areas, where fire regimes are a requirement for the maintenance of the heathland.

Does this mean that every humid and sub-humid place in Australia is heathland? It sounds unlikely. My guess is that the second part about fire regimes is meant to qualify the first part -- heaths occur in all humid and sub-humid places in Australia where there is regular fire? But I can't tell. For one, a "fire regime", as I understand it, is just a description of how often and in what forms fire occurs in a particular landscape. Everyplace has a fire regime. On the polar ice cap the fire regime is "no fire", to take an extreme case. Perhaps I misunderstand the term, but since there's no wikipedia page on it, it is hard to tell what is meant. Since this is one of the only pages that link to the non-existent "fire regime" page, perhaps the sentence could be reworded and made clearer? Pfly 05:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Does this mean that every humid and sub-humid place in Australia is heathland? No, it doesn't mean that. It means that heath forms in all sub-humid and humid areas in Australia. In much the same way I might say that Indinas established farms in all sub-arctic locales in North America. That obviously doesn't mean that every place in America was literally an Indian farm. It simply means that any sub-artcic locale you care to name had an Indian farm of some sort. In exactly the same wway any humid or sub-humid local ein Australia will have some sort of heath, whether that be sandstone heath, swalee heath, platueau heath or so forth. If you can think of a better way to express this feel free to do so.

"For one, a "fire regime", as I understand it, is just a description of how often and in what forms fire occurs in a particular landscape. Everyplace has a fire regime." This is perfectly correct. I'm not sure how excatly you want he sentence made clearer. Heaths in Australia are highly dependant on the appropriate fire regime. What that regime may be varies with the eocsystem. In some places the heath requires annual winter fires to exist, in other places it requires summer fires every 10-30 years. In other places it requires constinual mosaic burning and so on and so forth. The only common element is that the heath exists because of the fire regime. Alter the rgeime and the heath ceases to exist. Again I am not sure how to reword this to make it any clearer. The Austalian heaths are maintained not just by climatic and edaphic factors but by fire regime.

Why is fire regime hotlinked? No idea.Ethel Aardvark

[edit] Do plants make a heath a heath?

The terms heath and heathland aren't used much in America, as far as I know. I've long thought it was because heathland has specific plants that are mainly European and African, particularly heath and heather. Calluna heather seems to be mainly European in origin, although introduced to other places like New Zealand. Erica "heath" plants seem to be mainly European and African in origin, at least according to existing wikipedia pages. This page says that heathland occurs in California. I'm guessing the California heathlands are called something else in California? Is it chaparral? The chaparral page says nothing about heath, although the description sounds similar. Maybe Coastal sage scrub is heathland?

I have the same basic trouble with the Moorland page -- having thought a moor was a type of upland bog dominated by heather and other specifically European or African plants and animals. Like this page on heathland, the moorland page says they occur worldwide, including North America. But I am not aware of any place in America being called a heath or a moor. So it makes me wonder -- is it sensible to say heathland does not necessarily include heath plants? Is a moor any kind of boggy upland? Or are these terms used for particular kinds of flora and fauna? As a counterexample, consider pocosin -- a term for a boggy upland with a particular type of flora and fauna specific to a small region of America. The heath and moorland pages give me the impression that pocosins are a kind of heath or moor -- although it is not clear which, if either.

Just some thoughts. Both these pages seem to be a little divided in themselves as to just what heaths and moors are really. Thoughts? Pfly 05:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Good question, and one which may be partly illuminated by looking at the history of these two articles. Once upon a time Heath (habitat) contained information about both heaths and moors, but with a bias towards northern Europe and in particular the British Isles. Starting with this edit it was amended to include information about heaths and/or moors in other parts of the world (see also "What a horribly Eurocentric page" above). I subsequently split off the article on moorland, after proposing it here and hearing no objections. It seems these articles have received very little attention from knowledgeable editors recently (I'm certainly not one of them), and may not be entirely reliable. If you feel you can improve and/or rewrite this article, please do. --Blisco 11:03, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

The problem arises in part because there is no consistency in defining ecosystems. Every author and organisation has there own standard. Nonetheless the term heath, no matter how it is defined, is known to exist worldwide and is in no way restricted to Europe as the original article suggested. For instance the schema of Specht is wideley followed in classifyng Australian veg and includes heath as distinct vegetation. Similarly the WWF recognises numerous heath vegetation types worldwide eg : http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/where_we_work/asia_pacific/our_solutions/new_guinea_forests/area_forests_new_guinea/new_guinea_forests_ecosystems/index.cfm

Specht actually does a reasonable job of tracing the history and usage of the word from an ecological perspective. If I get the time I may summarise it and add it to this article. However to date all I've done is correct the inaccuraices in the original article without contributing anything substantial.

So no, heath doens't have a specific plants, that varies depending on location, however all heathlands arise from similar environmental conditions and also share floristic characteristics due to convergence. So a heath is typically found on nutrient poor, acid, sandy soils that are subject to periodic dryong. The system is dominated by woody plants less than 3m height. The plants have storng tendency to sclerophylly and so forth. And yes, heathlands have to contain heath plants in the same way that all forests have to contain forest plants. Heath is an ecosyetem description and defined in large part by the flora: low, woody, scleroplyllous etc. The thing is that Australian or Bornean heath vegetaion is still heath vegetation even though largely unrelated to European heath veg.

And yes, heathlands in California tend to be called chapparal. In fact whatis now termed the 'chapparal biome' was called the 'mediterranen/west coast heathland' biome unitl a decade or so back when it was altered to reduce confusion. We can't really attempt to list every possible local name for heathlands since there are literally thousands: chaparral, maquis, fynbos, kwongan, sandstone scrub and so forth though we coudl perhaps list and link to some of the mroe noteworthy or common types. Similarly the Chaparral page can't realistically be expected to note that the ecosystem is a heath, a woodland, a mediterranean sclerophyllous low forest, a new world seasonally dry wooded grassland and so forth. There are hundreds of such descriptions that could be applied to such an ecosystem depending on what author and what scheme you favour. If you really think it worth the effort then by all means add a mention that it is a type of mediterranean heath.

Moors I hardly feel qualified to coment on. The term isn't used much in my neck of the woods, but insofar as a moor is any infertile, seasonally waterlogged upland ecosystem dominated by woody plants then moors certainly occur worldwide. If pocosin is an upland ecosyetem found on infertile soil and dominated by sclerophyllous woody vergetaion less than 3 metres in height and the soil is waterlogged at least seasonally then it's a moorland. Ethel Aardvark

Ah, thanks for the responses to both of my questions, I think I understand better now. I'll try to look into all this some more and help out on these pages, time and energy permitting of course.. Pfly 15:28, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Photos

I've reverted to the lower res fynbos photo just as I've changed the photo of English heath, and for the sme reasons. In both cases the photo currently on the page is a far better depiction of heath. The alternative photos realy don't show the characteristic low woody vegeation that is hetahland. We really need photos that show wall-to-wall shrub cover that typifies healthlands. The high res fynbos may show this but it realy isn't obvious.Ethel Aardvark 04:14, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

The photos are doubles. Please find correct ones. ReX —Preceding unsigned comment added by ReX0r (talk • contribs) 15:37, 24 January 2008 (UTC)