From stand-scale palaeoecology to the conservation of old-growth ‘ancient’ woodland

• A novel multi-proxy palaeoecological approach to woodland dynamics and management. • The resilience of high conservation value woodlands with long legacies of human impact. • Maps and ancient woodland indicators may inaccurately identify ancient woodlands. Linkages between woodland longevity and conservation value are often assumed but rarely tested. The superiority of ‘old growth’ or ‘ancient’ woodlands for biodiversity and carbon sequestration is being increasingly recognised, yet deterioration is ongoing. There is a need to better understand and reliably identify ‘ancient’ woodlands to appropriately protect their conservation value. Maps, toponymics and ancient woodland indicator species can provide conflicting, potentially unreliable, evidence of woodland longevity. This research aims to demonstrate how palaeoecological indicators can be tailored to provide vital linkages between long-term palaeoecology and short-term ecology for understanding woodland history and informing management of valuable habitats. We apply a multi-indicator approach of stand-scale analyses of pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, loss-on-ignition, charcoal and plant macrofossils to address uncertainties in woodland antiquity and explore disturbance dynamics. Our approach validates the status of ‘ancient’ woodlands, highlighting their longevity and co-evolved features of conservation value, and the need for cautious interpretation of alternative indicators of woodland history. We identify substantial compositional and structural changes where woodland has persisted for over 3500 years, and resilience to external forcings, including fire, herbivory, climatic changes and people. We demonstrate the need to integrate tailored palaeoecological indicators into modern woodland management to identify appropriate management strategies, including re-diversifying tree species composition and reinstating sustainable disturbance regimes. Of broader significance, how we define ‘ancient’ woodlands requires reconsideration in light of potential inaccuracies in alternative evidence of woodland longevity, and the unique histories that have shaped ancient woodlands requires recognition, which can all be realised using palaeoecological indicators.