science and research relating to trees, woodlands, forests, forestry, silviculture and arboriculture
A new paper published this month demonstrates a clear relationship between the prevailing worldviews of land owners and their distrust in policy, in their willingness to adopt practices that will help adaptation to environmental change. Read More
Are you a Musketeer, Team Player, Funambulist, Existentialist or Realist? Discover your own ECOTYPE and find out how you compare to others in this exciting new measure of environmental citizenship. Read More
The Sylva Foundation has launched its national survey exploring attitudes, actions and awareness to environmental change. Take part . . . Read More
Which tree is out in leaf first near you – the ash or the oak? Don’t let Covid-19 get in the way of some good citizen science. Read More
An update to my long-term photomonitoring project of two trees at Piles Copse on Dartmoor, first noted in a publication in 1922. Read More
If we look at the utility of trees in a new light, and through a new lens, we may be surprised by what we can see and what we can value. Among all trees, the oak is perhaps best placed to gift us a renewed sight. Read More
As the spread of ash dieback across Britain becomes noticeable, there is a peak in interest about the consequences of ash dieback, with landowners and conservationists seeking good advice about what tree species is best to plant to help nature recover. Here’s a simply summary for landowners, based of peer-reviewed research. Read More
Today, the media picked up on the importance of the scientific paper which I revealed yesterday, which calculates the economic cost of ash dieback in Britain to total £15 billion. Read More
One of my more recent co-authored research articles has been selected as ‘Editor’s Choice’ in The Applied Ecologist’s Blog . The paper, Maintaining ecosystem properties after loss of ash in Great Britain by Louise Hill et al, focusses on the importance of using plant functional traits to predict potential changes to an ecosystem, following the loss of a key species. Read More
Silvology: redefining the biological science for the study of forests With co-author Jens Peter Skovsgaard I propose a formal definition for a term that describes the scientific study of forests and woods: silvology. In contrast to other disciplines no terminology has developed to distinguish the practice of silviculture from its scientific counterpart. For example,… Read More
This week Sylva Foundation published the long-awaited report for the British Woodlands Survey 2017: Shaping the Future of Forestry. It’s been a labour of love working alongside my fellow authors. We were victims of our own success in attracting such a fantastic response from so many people across Britain: 1,630 stakeholders took part, representing one-fifth… Read More
My writing about art and math in nature are always among my most popular posts, and I’ve meant to write about fractals for a while because they fascinate me. This time of year the bare branches of deciduous trees display their full beauty and fascinating growth patterns. Did you know that most trees have no… Read More
