Susannah Fleiss and Marc Metzger, University of Edinburgh
Vanessa Burton, Woodland Trust
Heather Gilbert, National Forest Company

The TreE PlaNat project was conceived from the outset to include a strong element of knowledge exchange, which has proved more fruitful than any of us had envisaged. Our staff team includes Vanessa Burton, Conservation adviser on woodland creation at the Woodland Trust, and Heather Gilbert, Research and Evidence Manager at the National Forest Company, as formal project partners. Together with Marc Metzger and Susannah Fleiss at the University of Edinburgh, we have coordinated a number of activities and learned from a broad range of woodland creation practitioners and policymakers, to ensure that our project findings can directly support woodland creation on the ground. In this blog post, we provide an overview of our knowledge exchange activities and outputs, and reflect on the successes and how collaboration between research, practice and policy could continue to help support land management.

From the outset, plans for TreE PlaNat included a series of blogs and webinars, the launch of a new demonstration site in the National Forest, a training event on woodland creation methods for land managers and advisers (held in August 2024, but two more will be run in 2025), articles in practitioner magazines, a summary research briefing for policymakers, and production of infographics (all of which will be made available in spring 2025). Crucially, plans included the establishment of a ‘Knowledge User Board’ of practitioners, advisers and policymakers, who have met regularly throughout the project, to bring together working knowledge and provide feedback on our research and outputs. The Knowledge User Board was intended to ensure that findings and outputs generated from the project would reach land managers, professional advisers and governmental organisations in a useful form, and also that the research team could learn from operational experience and ensure that their questions were directly relevant to professionals’ experiences on the ground. In practice, discussions in the group led to a number of ideas for unforeseen outputs, and highlighted the wealth of existing knowledge on the topic, which we were able to bring together in a practitioners’ perspectives paper (in review).

There were 17 active members of the Knowledge User Board, whose remit spanned Great Britain, and included individuals from government and public sector organisations, nationwide environmental NGOs, regional and local woodland expansion sites (environmental NGOs and community forests), utilities companies, foresters, consultants and land agents, and farmers and farmer networks. The group met every three months throughout the project, with the aims of:
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1. Establishing and strengthening a stakeholder-researcher network for knowledge exchange
2. Establishing and understanding knowledge needs
3. Supporting research interpretation
4. Supporting research impact

Knowledge User Board members themselves hoped to gain a clearer understanding of creating woodland through natural processes (both in terms of ecology and practical establishment and management), to share their knowledge and learn from others’ experiences, and obtain a better understanding of others’ viewpoints on the topic.

Discussions with the Knowledge User Board highlighted a number of key knowledge gaps and needs on the topic of creating woodland through natural processes. Where possible, we have addressed these, which has led us to a suite of project outputs that (we hope!) are of direct use to land managers, professional advisers and policymakers – and which we had not originally envisaged at the start of the project. This concerted effort to address stakeholder needs would not have been possible without staff dedicated to knowledge exchange and impact in the project team.

A key need highlighted early on was for sharing of case studies using natural colonisation, because of limited currently available information, and the high degree of variability of the process. To this end, we began to collate case studies as part of the project, and now have a set of 15 from across Britain (currently available as a preliminary version that includes five examples). Knowledge User Board members stressed the importance of sharing ‘unsuccessful’ examples, where natural colonisation has not (yet) resulted in a woodland, and we have included information on some of these where possible.

The group brought up many questions around understanding the ecological process of natural colonisation. We tapped into our networks to bring together 10 experts in a webinar on the topic, to report on their research findings and share further case studies. At this juncture, it became clear that our extended network held considerable knowledge and experience on creating woodlands through natural processes, which we decided to bring together in a short ‘Practitioners’ Perspective’ paper, currently in review at the Journal of Applied Ecology. This paper synthesises practical experiences from 15 case studies of natural colonisation with current academic knowledge, and will provide an important evidence base for land managers, policymakers and researchers alike.

And some reflections from our project partners:

Heather Gilbert, Research and Evidence Manager at the National Forest Company –

By Vanessa Burton, Woodland Trust.

​A sunny August midweek found an unusual collection of woodland ecologists, advisers and practitioners coming together in the National Forest. We weren’t the usual clientele for the Deer Barn, which usually hosts weddings or kids for the adventure park (although some of us had to resist the temptation of the huge bouncy slide). The aim: to share knowledge around integrating more natural processes into woodland creation practice, and all made possible by a collaboration between the Woodland Trust conservation training programme, the TreE PlaNat research project and the National Forest.

This two-day knowledge exchange and training event aimed to: 

• disseminate the latest evidence from the TreE PlaNat (and other relevant) research projects 

• enable practitioners and advisers to network and share knowledge, and  

• develop the latest in a series of woodland creation training events run by the Woodland Trust across the UK

We kicked off hearing from Elisa Fuentes-Montemayor, TreE PlaNat’s principal investigator, about the learnings from the long-term natural experiment, WrEN, or “Woodland creation and Ecological Networks” which has been running since 2013. This project has set up a replicated chronology of woodland creation sites in Scotland and England and has carried out numerous field surveys on these sites over time.  ​

The WrEN project has given us a great understanding about how planted woodland creation sites develop over time. We know that habitat development is slow, and that it takes from 80-160 years for characteristics similar to that of an ancient woodland to develop. Most sites also show a significant lack of natural regeneration in the understory. In terms of biodiversity outcomes, creating new woodland adjacent to existing ones (i.e. close proximity) is really beneficial for several taxa including moths, small mammals and plants. We also know that more complex woodland habitat structure (e.g. gaps, fallen trees, variety of tree sizes) is associated with greater abundance and/or diversity in many taxa. 

So, we know a decent amount about planted woodlands - that they can lack some of the features of a ‘good’ habitat, and that it takes a long time for these features to develop. Because of the urgency of the nature and climate crises, there’s therefore a lot of interest in (and expectations of) natural processes such as natural regeneration and natural colonisation, to help us meet national creation targets. It’s often assumed that these processes will create woodlands with more complex structure (therefore benefiting biodiversity) and be more resilient than planted woodlands. 
 
However, as highlighted by Kevin Watts on the day, to date there’s been a limited evidence base for the outcomes of woodland created via natural processes, because of a small number of studies, highly variable results & possible survivorship bias, where results are only reported when they’re positive (i.e. where natural colonisation successfully resulted in a new woodland). We have some limited knowledge about what to expect from recent research (see Bauld et al. 2023), but research gaps remain, and TreE PlaNat has been aiming to fill some of these.  
 
Laura Braunholtz talked the group through some early results from the ecology work package of the project, where new woodland creation sites created by planting, natural colonisation, and a hybrid of the two have been compared. Structure came through as an important variant between the three methods, and often correlated with biodiversity measures. Planted sites were predominantly uniform, while higher ‘gappiness’ in hybrid sites with a mixture of planting and natural colonisation was associated with higher floral species richness and moth species riches & abundance. 
 
If you’re keen to find out more, take a look at Laura’s blog https://www.wren-project.com/tree-planat-blog/notes-from-the-field, Thiago & Sam’s blog on structural measurements of the field sites using LiDAR https://www.wren-project.com/tree-planat-blog/lasering-trees-for-science-how-we-use-lidar-technology-to-understand-woodland-ecology and the ecology webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAN-ylzGgWE.  ​

On day two, the groups took pre-prepared woodland creation designs for the site and discussed the appropriate woodland communities (species composition) and method choices for the site, making use of the Woodland Trust Tree Species Handbook. ​

We finished by discussing four possible trajectories for natural colonisation sites that have been highlighted in work by Forest Research. We explored how natural processes might result in: 

1. A woodland community similar to source woodland 
2. Unpalatable vegetation (e.g. bracken, bramble) dominating 
3. A single tree or shrub species dominating 
4. Very few trees establishing at all 

 
The groups had valuable discussions about how to respond in each of these situations. A recurring theme was that good monitoring and adaptive management are essential to respond appropriately, but that these are currently hard to do in practice due to time, resource and guidance limitations. ​

Big thanks to Heather and Simon at the National Forest for hosting us.​