Langholm Moor Demonstration Project - completion plan

This 10-year project completes in October 2017.  The project is set up as a company and it is run by a Board of Directors, which met, last week, to discuss how the project is to be managed between now and completion.  This follows the sad resignation of the Headkeeper, Simon Lester, earlier this month, and other reductions in the gamekeeping team.

See the news item on the Project's website for details of the plan that has been announced.

I am a member of the Science & Technical Advisory Group.  As this Group is a form of scientific watchdog for the project, many members are professors, but there are some members who have management experience.  I was invited to join the Group in 2013 to provide further support on habitat management, and it has helped to have had some direct output from the Project that I have been able to share with Scotland's Moorland Forum.

The Directors have acknowledged that the Project is not going to meet all the targets that were set for it. However, there have been many successes and I welcome the plan to write up properly all the work that has been completed so that the moorland management community can get full value from the project. Inevitably, there will be criticism that all the targets will not be achieved, but this should not be seen as failure.  Targets are always going to be at risk when dealing with natural systems that cannot be tightly controlled, and the final report from the Project will need to balance the successes against the challenges that still remain to be answered.

Will there be an appetite for a Langholm 3 project?