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The Chaussitre Priority Ecological Site

The site is part of a broad peneplain - an "almost plain" in a low mountain range- and it resembles an ocean of green rolling out from a height of 1000m. That is not to say that the countryside is dull or uniform. Everywhere you look, in the hollows and the knolls, you find a different environment..

Peat-bogs and highlands

On the Crêt de Chaussitre (1240m), the highest point of that area, the moors are made up of heather, blueberry and gorse bushes. In places, the bracken and a host of shrubs, more locally high Junipers, came to colonise the lower vegetation. Plantations of white-firs and beech-firs occupy certain slopes.

Above the valleys where the wetlands are decorated with yellow-petaled buttercups and daffodils, the fragile peat-bogs have formed.

Maintaining diversity

Maintaining this kind of diversity is one of the main issues pertaining to the management of this site. The abandonment of the pastures, the new forest plantations along with the agricultural drainage all put the moors and bogs at risk of disappearing forever.

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