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  • Home
  • About WrEN
    • Who we are
    • The history of WrEN
    • Study design
    • Wildlife & habitat surveys
    • Contact
  • Funding & Support
  • Outputs
  • Related projects
    • TreE PlaNat
    • Restoring Resilient Ecosystems
    • Temporal & spatial spillovers
    • Woodland soils
    • Trees outside Woodlands
    • Woodland bats & landscape context
  • Blog

TreE PlaNat
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Stakeholder perceptions and socio-ecological consequences of treescape expansion through planting & natural colonisation 

Tree planting has been the most common woodland expansion strategy in the UK  for many decades.  Despite  its  many benefits,  this  approach  is  increasingly being questioned following overestimates of benefits, poor targeting and challenges in scaling-up at the level required to meet ambitious woodland expansion targets. As a result, there is growing interest in incorporating ‘natural  colonisation’  (allowing  trees to  colonise  new  areas  naturally,  often  as  a  component  of ‘rewilding’) into woodland expansion strategies, partly because it is assumed that naturally created woodlands  will  be  more structurally  diverse,  ecologically  complex  and resilient  than  planted  sites.

In this interdisciplinary project (funded by UKRI through their 
Treescapes programme) we  will explore the attitudes of  a  diverse  range  of agricultural land  managers towards woodland creation strategies spanning the planting to natural colonisation continuum. We will also quantify the differing ecological and social consequences of these approaches, and identify factors associated  with  woodland  resilience. Finally,  we  will  integrate  socio-ecological evidence  to demonstrate  how  tree  planting  and  natural  colonisation  can  be  used  in  combination  to scale-up woodland expansion for a range of objectives on agricultural land. Watch intro video about the project here.
Picture

Overview of work planned for the TreE_PlaNat project, including work packages (WPs). WP1 (yellow) focuses on understanding the perceptions of a diversity of agricultural land managers for a range of objectives; WP2 (blue) assesses the outcomes of such woodland creation approaches; WP3 (green) integrates knowledge derived from WP1 & 2 with the aim to influence land managers’ engagement with woodland creation through a combination of planting and natural colonisation
Picture

One of our sites in England with a degree of natural colonisation to the east (indicated by the red line)
Contributors to this project

University of Stirling, University of Edinburgh, Royal Holloway, University of London, Forest Research, The National Forest Company, The Woodland Trust, NatureScot, Forestry Commission UK, LEAF, Natural England and Tarmac
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