The Club is delighted to organise a series of monthly (September-April) Club-wide online talks for members, in addition to local branch events. Not an SOC member? Find out more about membership and the many perks it offers, including access to the winter talks programme and the Club's quarterly journal Scottish Birds.
Prof Kirsty Park: Using historical woodland creation sites as test landscapes to inform future conservation actions
How do we know whether planting new woodlands really makes a difference for wildlife? And can newly created woodland ever offer the same benefits as ancient woodland?
We look forwarding to welcoming Prof Kirsty Park, conservation scientist at the University of Stirling, to our January Online Members' Event. Kirsty will share thought-provoking insights from more than a decade of research across the UK, revealing how wildlife responds as woodlands mature and what we can learn to make future habitat creation work better for nature.
About the talk:
Creating new habitat on a large scale is now seen as essential if we are to tackle the biodiversity crisis. But how well does it actually work? Most studies have been short, small in scale, or focused on just one group of wildlife, so the evidence is patchy.
Since 2013, the WrEN project has taken a different approach. Rather than waiting decades to watch new woodlands grow, the project surveyed 107 woodlands across the UK that were planted between 10 and 160 years ago, using their different ages to show how woodlands change over time. So far it has recorded more than 1,400 species across 10 groups, including plants, lichens, insects, bats and birds.
In this talk Kirsty will explore what these woodlands can tell us about how wildlife responds as new woodlands mature, how the size and location of a site influence what it supports, and whether new woodland can ever replace ancient woodland. She will finish with three practical priorities for designing future woodland creation, so that it delivers the most benefit for wildlife, including birds.
About our speaker:
Kirsty is a conservation scientist with a focus on quantifying the effects of environmental change on biological diversity and testing the efficacy of solutions to mitigate anthropogenic impacts. Her research spans multiple habitats and land-uses, with a focus on heavily anthropogenic landscapes (e.g. forestry, agriculture, urban) and across a diverse range of taxa. Since 2013, she has been co-lead of a long-term research programme related to RestREco, the WrEN project (Woodland Creation & Ecological Networks; www.wren-project.com), a collaboration of academics, policy makers and practitioners interested in the restoration of ecologically degraded landscapes. She works with a wide range of policy and practitioner organisations and is a Trustee for the Loch Lomond & Trossachs Countryside Trust.
Willow Warbler © Ron Penn
