Heatwave: How extreme weather is affecting nature in Scotland

Temperatures reached a record high in recent days, with average daily maximums the highest seen since tracking began in 1910.

That 10C average rose to 18.3C in the Aberdeenshire village of Aboyne on February 21, when the mercury rose to 18.3C.

The month was also one of the driest experienced, particularly in the east of the country, and the Met Office says it was the sixth sunniest ever for the UK as a whole.

With blossom on the branches and daffodils in full bloom, retailers are enthusiastically pushing their spring ranges and some households are already shooing bees and wasps out of windows.

READ MORE: Temperature hits 21C on record warmest UK winter day

Which is all lovely, isn’t it? Especially when last year, Scotland was blanketed in snow brought by the “Beast from the East”, which stalled transport, shut schools and stretched services.

But what if it’s not?

According to experts, both periods are part of the same problem – weather “weirding” brought by climate change. Efforts to help gardeners and growers adapt are already under way.

“The implications are actually very scary”, said Ruth Monfries, climate change adaptation researcher at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE). “What we are seeing in Scotland is more extremes. Climate change doesn’t mean gradually getting warmer, it’s more extremes of everything. When it does rain it tends to be more intense. Heatwaves last longer, as do cold spells. It’s very difficult to manage all of these issues.

“We are looking at a challenge.”

Monfries and colleagues are working on a long-term plan to analyse the capital attraction and its four satellite sites – Benmore near Dunoon, Dawyck near Peebles and Logan, on the country’s south-western tip – to 2050.

They are monitoring key species in their collections, such as the non-native rhododendrons which are now up to three weeks ahead of expectations, to track the impact of our changing weather on plant life.

But, because of the volume of data needed, those results are 30 years away. Action, Monfries says, is needed now, with native wild flora like montane willows and flowering Alpine blue-sow-thistle – already restricted to just four sites in Perthshire – under threat as winters become increasingly dry and warm.

This winter, according to researcher Iain Cameron, who maintains a snow cover record for the Royal Meteorological Society, is among the “most snowless of the last 70 years”. The Scottish Avalanche Information Service warned a huge snow ledge on Aonach Mor in Lochaber had suffered significant melt as temperatures climbed. As the picture changes on the peaks, imported mountain varieties from Vietnam are thriving at Logan Botanic Garden.

RGBE hopes that site could become a haven for shrubs which are now threatened in the Asian nation, with the lowlands of Scotland potentially becoming instrumental in ensuring their survival.

And at Benmore, efforts are underway to ease waterlogging around its famous redwood avenue and prevent the roots of those well-established North American giants from “drowning and dying off”.

“It’s a winners and losers kind of thing,” she says. “There will be some things that don’t do well.

“It would be relatively easy to say it’s getting wetter and that’s all we have to deal with. We are getting all the extremes, and that’s a lot harder.”

As well as monitoring and recording data for future analysis, RGBE is trialling various measures to help Scotland’s green spaces adapt in the coming years.

This, the organisation hopes, will lead to changes in civic and private gardens. In Edinburgh, “living lawns” focus on the benefits of allowing a range of species, including wild flowers and clovers, to take root amongst the standard greenery, benefitting insect life and creating a mix better able to withstand prolonged sun and dry conditions.

In contrast, its “rain garden” aims to find solutions to localised flooding, bringing in mosses and plant types that hold more moisture. Developers, Monfries says, have shown interest in adopting this for new housing projects. “We’re trying to share our information with visitors,” she says. “That’s going to be important.”

At Scotland’s Agricultural College (SRUC), efforts are focused on not the ornamental, but the edible.

The institution, which has campuses throughout the country, aims to deliver the skills and support needed to grow land-based industries. That, professor Fiona Burnett says, includes the development of techniques that can see growers through the swings in temperature and conditions that have taken hold.

Professor Fiona Burnett

Burnett, SRUC group manager for crop and soil systems, says this will be crucial for the country’s main crops, which include barley, wheat, potatoes and oilseed rape.

“There’s been much written about all the poor garden flowers,” she tells the Sunday National. “But crops are very advanced for the time of year and the contrast with a year ago when they were under snow couldn’t be starker.

“It’s not just the warm February, we’ve had a warm October, November, December and so very advanced winter crops, which is good in that they have lots of yield potential, so that’s making people quite optimistic.

“But we’re also likely to have more disease and pests, like aphids that carry viruses and flea beetles which eat oilseed rape. Normally a hard winter kills off a certain amount. Growers will now have to manage them.

“That is a real trend almost certainly linked to climate change. We are always moving between extremes. We seem to get stuck in weather patterns for longer – it’ll be dry for longer than we would expect, heatwaves last longer and rain lasts longer. Farmers have long memories – they can tell you what it was like in 2012, 2011, going back. They’re already starting to ask, ‘Will this year be like 1976?’”

The summer heatwave that year brought wildfire and drought to parts of the UK. Firefighters were called to a gorse fire on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh last week, the cause of which has not yet been determined. On the same day, crews dealt with an “apocalyptic” blaze covering around 1.5sq km of moorland near Saddleworth Moor in West Yorkshire.

“It’s a huge issue, the extremes,” says Burnett, whose team is trialling new crop species, farming methods and treatment types. “And we never know which it’s going to be. We have had the warmest spring, the coldest spring, the warmest summer, the wettest summer. Every season seems to bring some new challenge and it makes an amazing difference in how people can plan.

“This year a lot of crops are already hungry for fertiliser. If we feed now, they’ll run out of steam later in the season and there will be a lot of waste. It’s a big deal for growers. A year ago we had very little pest and disease and this year we are dealing with a very different scenario.”

Farmers, Burnett says, have had to become even more reactive than in years past, using the unseasonably favourable conditions as an opportunity to get ahead, ploughing and preparing land.

There are big gains in grass this year, taking the pressure off operators with mixed farms who rely on that to feed their animal stock. “It’s seen as a real positive,” she says, “After last year when grass was in short supply, which had a cost implication.

“Crops at the moment have very good potential. There’s everything to play for.”

However, both experts warn that an unexpected cold snap could throw growers off track, something which could also hit numbers of pollinating insects and also reduce prey for birdlife.

If prolonged, this could prompt yet more concerns about biodiversity. And though alarm bells aren’t currently ringing on that front, temperatures have already reduced from those February highs as March begins, with weather warnings in place for some parts of the UK this weekend.

Storm Freya is to push north-east across southern Scotland, as well as parts of England and Wales, this afternoon. It’ll clear into the North Sea early tomorrow, Met Office forecasters say, but will bring gusts of up to 65mph, rising to as much as 80mph for coastal areas in Wales and north-west England.

As the variations continue, Monfries says, growers have to be realistic and pragmatic. “A lot of what we at RGBE have is from Victorian times. What we have got is the legacy of what people did then. What’s the legacy going to be of what we do now? What is it important to conserve?

“We are trying to be very active about that.”