Vera Conference

The Vera Conference, held at Knepp in June 2017, was a meeting to celebrate the hypothesis of eminent Dutch ecologist, Frans Vera, twenty years after the publication of his ground-breaking ‘Grazing Ecology & Forest History’. Prominent mollusc, beetle and lichen specialists presented evidence to support Vera’s theory that the presence of great herds of large herbivores would have played a key role in maintaining open areas in temperate zone Europe. Many species, especially those associated with old trees, the speakers argued, would have struggled in closed canopy woodland but would have thrived in a more open landscape. Our landscape was far more likely to have been characterised by wood pasture – a patchwork of grasslands, thorny scrub and bramble, supporting groves of trees and gigantic, individual open-grown trees such as oaks. At Knepp we have put Vera’s theory into practice. Free-roaming large herbivores living in our emerging scrubland have demonstrated enormous benefits for wildlife by creating a kaleidoscope of complex and dynamic habitats. The animals’ disturbance has prevented vegetation from evolving into ubiquitous closed canopy woodland. This throws into question the conventional interpretation of pollen records that, up until now, promoted the theory that Mesolithic Europe would have been covered in closed-canopy ‘primeval forest’.