Cairngorms Upland Advisory Group meeting minutes - August 2025

FINAL CUAG minutes – Thu 29 Aug 2024 Ven­ue: in per­son in Park Author­ity office, Grant­own and online attendees. In attend­ance in per­son: Peter Cos­grove (Chair & Park Author­ity Board), Colin McCle­an, Fiona Holmes, Andy Ford, Grant Moir (lat­ter part of meet­ing only) (all Park Author­ity), Leslie George (SGA) lain Wilson (NFUS), Graeme Taylor (NS), Will Ander­son (Con­For), Online attendees: Claire Smith (RSPB), Richard Cooke (ADMG), Steph­en Young (SLE), Stu­art Smith (JHI), Rory Kennedy (GWCT). Apo­lo­gies: Mike Cot­tam (Park Author­ity) Peter Clark (BASC) Dave Windle (NE Moun­tain Trust), Alis­on Hester (JHI), John Gri­er­son (AoCC/​LOAF), Han­nah Grist (Park Author­ity Board), John Risby (SF), Tim Kirk­wood (Cairngorms Con­nect), Dav­id Frew (NTS), Richard Gled­son (ECMP), Colin Stuart.

Minutes of last meet­ing: No com­ments, all accepted.

Actions from last meeting:

• CUAG to let Park Author­ity know of any fire hot-spot locations
• NatureScot to report in more detail on this at next CUAG meet­ing (date set for 29 Aug 2024)
• NatureScot to share draft scope of review when it’s available
• NatureScot to share example cop­ies of their fire plans with CUAG
• Park Author­ity to con­tact NFU Mutu­al and invest­ig­ate insur­ance for wild­fires in nat­ive wood­lands further

PART 1 — UPDATES:

1: Cli­mate Adapt­a­tion Fund The Park Author­it­ies Andy Ford gave a sum­mary of the grants awar­ded to date from the Cli­mate Adapt­a­tion Fund. More inform­a­tion can be found by fol­low­ing this link: https://​cairngorms​.co​.uk/​c​l​i​m​a​t​e​-​a​d​a​p​t​a​t​i​o​n​-​fund/

2: Cairngorm Farm­ing Advis­ory Group No meet­ings since the last one in March 2024; there is now an agri­cul­ture focussed news­let­ter being pro­duced by the Park Author­ity and CUAG mem­bers are wel­come to put for­ward art­icles to be con­sidered for inclusion.

PART 2 — DISCUSSIONS:

1: Integ­rated Wild­fire Man­age­ment Plan (Colin McCle­an) CUAG mem­ber­st should expect the next iter­a­tion of draft text in mid-Octo­ber Dis­cus­sion of impres­sions of sec­tions draf­ted so far:

• More details reques­ted in the plan about resi­li­ence and fuel loads – Colin respon­ded that these sec­tions are com­ing but are still to be drafted.
• Influ­ence of access in terms of like­li­hood of fires start­ing and ease/​difficulty of fighting
• How to build resi­li­ence into land­scape, how to be more proactive
• How to effect­ively employ firebreaks, and what about des­ig­nated sites?

Colin shared thoughts that ori­gin­ally he’d envis­aged sit­ting down with land mangers and have two way dis­cus­sion to identi­fy where to site fire breaks but hav­ing invest­ig­ated the issues sur­round­ing this it’s now likely that in the plan there’ll be a list of good prac­tice guid­ance and that land man­agers will to take it from there, thus mak­ing their own decision about their land, but this might not be CUAGs expect­a­tions, so what do CUAG think?

Dis­cus­sion there­after included:

• con­sid­er­a­tion of neigh­bours and ​‘duty of care’ to not let any fire go off your ground there­fore best to have firebreaks around your property
• how to make most of fea­tures we have got like tracks, so then get rid of middle strip and con­trol veget­a­tion each side for instance
• how can CUAG, and this fire plan pro­cess, con­trib­ute to upskilling/​education of ​‘new’ landowners?
• Can we under­stand more about where new landown­ers might be get­ting their land man­age­ment advice from and influ­ence this with respect to wildfires
• Remem­ber this is a good prac­tice guideline vs do this here; CNPA has to pitch this report some­where in middle of gen­er­al good prac­tice and dic­tat­ing actions to be done in spe­cif­ic loc­a­tions! That’s what the Park Author­ity are ask­ing CUAG for advice on, how and where to pitch the report
• How to we get fire con­sidered at any time in pro­cess of man­aging land, i.e. con­sider it if for instance you’re chan­ging land use, from open moor to woodland
• Per­haps the role of the Park Author­ity should be pro­por­tion­ate to the risk… but CNPA should do more col­lab­or­ateive work, put­ting folk with less know­ledge in touch with those that do it.
• Should we resur­rect the old fire groups that used to exist?, we need coher­ent group facil­it­ated to keep up momentum
• Per­haps add wild­fire related things into the DMGs remit as these fora are already set up
• Do we, and how do we, involve agri­cul­ture sec­tor? Need for this depends where you are, only really rel­ev­ant for farmed land bor­der­ing onto sport­ing estates.
• Some kind of mon­it­or­ing will be required, and will be included in the plan.
• Wider con­ver­sa­tion about the dif­fer­ence between train­ing in wild­fire man­age­ment and actu­al experience.

Remind­er that the Park Author­ity board passed a motion to con­sult on fire byelaw in Septem­ber (but depends on Scot­Gov restric­tions on spend on communications).

Colin McCle­an asked are CUAG broadly happy with the way the Integ­rated Wild­fire Plan is form­ing up, and the con­sensus answer was yes.

2: Cairngorms Nature Action Plan (Sarah Hen­shall) Brief out­line of pur­pose and achieve­ments from cur­rent Cairngorms Nature Action Plan (CNAP): CNAP is one of the deliv­ery mech­an­isms of the Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan (NPPP), it gives clear pri­or­it­ies and an action plan for achiev­ing nature con­ser­va­tion deliv­ery with­in the Park. The CNAP is shep­her­ded by the Cairngorms Nature Steer­ing Group (CNSG). It’s nearly time to draw up a new plan, but the last 5yr plan (with Cov­id in the middle), achieved 79% of all actions are com­pleted and remainder all have sig­ni­fic­ant pro­gress made.

High­lights of this work included:

• Land­scape scale deliv­ery worked well, with good part­ner­ship work­ing that also helped secure fund­ing from oth­er sources.
• Spe­cies work made good pro­gress, par­tic­u­larly pine hov­er­fly, beaver and wildcat.
• Involving people more, with a ramp up of the Big Week­end and get­ting our increased Ranger team, achieved lots.
• The Cairngorms Nature Index (CNI) was developed from the CNAP indicators.

Les­sons learnt from the last CNAP included:

• Spe­cies recov­ery is dif­fi­cult to meas­ure but util­ising the ​‘spe­cies recov­ery curve’ mod­el helped, although there is still a lag time between com­plet­ing action and see­ing an increase in population;
• Part­ner­ship work­ing encour­aged oth­ers to take for­ward deliv­ery so it’s not just the Park Author­ity who are acting.

Areas for improve­ment included:

• How to empower indi­vidu­als and com­munit­ies to deliv­er the CNAP
• Com­bin­ing spe­cies spe­cif­ic actions into a wider land­scape approach

The new CNAP will be developed over next 6 – 12months. It is likely to focus more on eco­lo­gic­al net­works plus eco­sys­tem and land­scape res­tor­a­tion. Dis­cus­sion fol­lowed about:

• The rela­tion­ship between CNSG and CUAG as there is plenty of over­lap; could they be merged? No, too broad a scope then, per­haps the Park Author­ity can improve links between CNSG and CUAG?
• where pred­at­or con­trol fits into pic­ture of spe­cies protection/​recovery?
• How input of CUAG in a land­scape scale land man­age­ment sense can be helpfuL

ACTION: Park Author­ity to bring next draft CNAP to CUAG for help and advice

3: NatureScot (NS) spe­cies licens­ing review (Graeme Taylor)

Times­cales have changed because of a new min­is­ter com­ing into post so now late Autumn / early Winter before any draft is likely.

Likely to now include a ​‘register of licences’ to help NS deal with large num­bers of Free­dom of Inform­a­tion (Fol) requests (which cur­rently are about 3 per week) Expect a ques­tion­naire out to stake­hold­ers soon about what should be included in the licens­able pur­pose, evid­ence required, and what to put in register of licences.

Dis­cus­sion fol­lowed about:

• Query if any­thing in review about chan­ging the cri­ter­ia for get­ting a licence to pro­tect wildlife?
• The need for licences to con­trol pred­at­ors to pro­tect wild­life since there’s a ​‘nature emergency’
• There being a degree of sub­jectiv­itiy over what meets accept­able prac­tice when ful­filling a ​‘licens­able purpose’
• That it’s the pur­pose that’s being licences not the per­son applying

4: AOB Dis­cus­sion about pos­sible agenda ideas for future CUAG meetings:

• Have a guest speak­er on cer­tain topics;
• Using the NPPP as a struc­ture for dis­cus­sion of topics;
• Get­ting the Park Author­ity to share ongo­ing issues so CUAG can chip in with thoughts/​advice;
• More inform­a­tion about the suc­cess, or not, of diver­sion­ary feeding;
• Get­ting some of the new­er landown­ers in the Park to come along and share their vis­ions for their new landholding.
• How we get more dis­cus­sion going around the meet­ings for the top­ics considered

Also, there was a short dis­cus­sion on format for CUAG meet­ings, where the hybrid in per­son and online format is dif­fi­cult for all and not favoured, per­haps con­sider altern­at­ing all online, or all in-per­son and mov­ing the loc­a­tion of the inper­son meet­ings about, i.e. go to Ballater?

END