Wetlands play a disproportionate role across almost all categories of ecosystem services, from flood attenuation to carbon sequestration and are thus seen as the ‘low-hanging-fruit’ for many restoration programmes. They are also among the most sensitive and highly anthropogenically altered habitats globally. To date, most conservation, restoration and ecological understanding of wetland habitat change has been defined by divergence from some conception of ‘natural’. This understanding filters into nearly every aspect of legal, policy and practice frameworks surrounding wetland protection, conservation, and restoration. However, wetlands globally, and very prominently in Scotland, are socio-ecological systems with Homo sapiens being a (or the) key component of the functioning whole, often for the entire history of any specific wetland habitat. This PhD project will explore ways that humans have shaped (and in turn have been shaped by) wetland environments in the past with a view to influencing policy and practice of wetland conservation restoration. It will use approaches from landscape archaeology and cognate fields to assess the validity of traditional understanding of wetland environments as once ‘pristine’ but now degraded, to improve implementing nature-based solutions.
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