Living Uplands
Welcome to Living Uplands, a project dedicated to providing insight and resources for learning about our amazing Upland moorland, a very special landscape. We are building a new home that explores the special characteristics of an environment that sustains rich flora, protects endangered British fauna and wildlife, and is a carbon capturing colossus of deep peatland reserves. Working with Durham Wildlife Trust we aim to bring our Uplands to life, and into our schools and communities.
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About Living Uplands
Celebrating the Living Uplands
The Living Uplands project was first created to focus the attention on one of the UK's most endangered birds, the iconic black grouse. While developing resources on this species it became obvious that its story had a lot more to it.
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Wildlife
An abundance of wildlife, so tough yet so fragile
From a distance the uplands look relatively bleak and empty but when you start to examine them, spend time on them and look harder you realise they are a safe haven for many species of plants, birds, reptiles and mammals.
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Landscape
Space lots of it, and yet so much more to it
The uplands and moorlands of England are home to half of the United Kingdom's sites of scientific interest and a huge 74% of national parks in England are classed as a moorland or upland. Millions of people visit these areas each year.
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Community
Authentic valley communities
The uplands of England are often seen as areas of outstanding natural beauty with many upland communities dotted throughout. Such communities are best known for farming and working their local landscapes.
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UPLANDS
Uplands are any mountainous region or elevated mountainous areas. Generally speaking, upland refers to ranges of hills, typically up to 500-600m. Britain's upland areas are some of the most beautiful in the world, with elevated areas of dramatic features such as hills, moors, valleys and mountains. Such landscapes have inspired art, literature and music, they gather more than 70% of our drinking water, store billions of tons of carbon in peat and soils and are home to some of the UK's most rare but threatened wildlife and flora including 70% of the world's heather moorland. Though sparsely populated they host more than 100 million day visits a year.
MOORLAND
Moorland or moor is a type of habitat found in upland areas in temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands and montane grasslands and shrublands biomes, characterised by low-growing vegetation on acidic soils. It generally refers to open upland landscapes dominated by heather and maintained through human management. It is found above the limit of enclosed agricultural land and below the theoretical climatic tree line at about 600m. The term moorland can be used to include blanket bog and upland acid grassland. Dwarf-shrub species such as heathers, bilberry, cowberry and crowberry characterise moorland, but there is variation according to climate, soils, drainage and management. Wetter areas are generally less heathery in appearance and can be picked out at a distance by the greener hues of purple moor-grass, deer grass and heath rush, sometimes spiked with bog asphodel and common cotton grass.
