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Long Term Research funds for Gair Wood granted by the British Ecological Society 

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Five years of funding, with an option to extend by a further five-year period, have been made available by the British Ecological Society to support long-term research at Gair Wood.

Currently, around 13% of the UK is woodland and the UK’s Climate Change Committee recommend increasing this coverage to 17-19% to support reaching a target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Community Forest Partnerships (such as the White Rose Forest) and grant funding opportunities increasingly emphasise planting native broadleaf woodlands to meet this goal.  

Much of the additional woodland creation will be through direct planting of tree seedlings. But what are the wider impacts of direct planting compared to allowing a woodland to develop over time through growth from local seed sources? It is unclear how these different approaches affect the ground flora diversity in areas of woodland creation, nor the changes to soil carbon.  A new grant from the British Ecological Society (BES) has been awarded to help answer these questions at Gair Wood, a 36-hectare broadleaf-dominated native woodland in the north of Leeds created in 2023. 

A drone photo of a field with trees planted on outside a fence and no planting inside it. Mature trees are nearby.

The fenced natural colonisation area at Gair Wood and nearby planting.

BES have awarded a “Long Term Research” grant to support the project “Comparing the impact of direct planting and natural colonisation of a woodland on ground flora diversity and soil” for an initial period of five years, with a possibility of a further five-year extension.  

Gair Wood was planted with sixty-six thousand native trees in early 2023 with the aim of improving biodiversity, sequestering carbon, creating a resource for the local community, and facilitating research. As part of this final goal, experiments were incorporated into the planting design, one of which was to compare the directly planted areas to an enclosure which will be allowed to recruit trees naturally from local seed sources. 

This area of local tree recruitment, referred to by foresters as “natural colonisation” was fenced off at the same time the trees were planted. This will allow scientists to study changes in the insect diversity, composition of ground flora, soil nutrients, and how carbon is stored and moves through the system.

Dr Tom Sloan crouching in a field with a long metal soil corer and a tape measure.

Dr Tom Sloan measuring increments on a soil corer used in the research project.

 The funding granted by BES will allow the Gair Wood team to compare the directly planted and natural colonisation areas. This will include examining soil nutrients and stored carbon, annual vegetation surveys to monitor changes in biodiversity, and “gas flux” measurements to monitor how carbon moves in and out of the soil in real-time. This new monitoring will be paired with soil temperature and moisture monitoring funded by project collaborators UBoC. 

This is the first dedicated research grant to study Gair Wood from an external source (although the site already hosts a range of other research activity focussed around student dissertations), and marks an important step to establishing Gair Wood as an important site for woodland research. The funding provided by BES will be invaluable to monitoring the vital initial years of the woodland creation project, and thanks to the long-term nature of the support offered it will hopefully produce a dataset that future research can be built on.