Gabriel Hemery's Blog: Gabriel Hemery, page 13
June 18, 2020
Government launches consultation on a Tree Strategy for England
Farmers, foresters and land managers, experts and environmental organisations, and members of the public are invited by government to give their views on the future creation and management of our trees, woodlands and forests in England.
The public consultation has been launched today and remains open until 11th September 2020.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says that subject to review, the resulting England Tree Strategy will be published later in the year. The new strategy will align with other strategies that flow from Defra’s 25-Year Environment Plan, including:
the recent Tree Health Resilience Strategy;the forthcoming England Peat Strategy and Nature Strategy;as well the future Environmental Land Management Scheme which will operate on the basis of providing public payments for public goods.
In the March Budget, Defra welcomed the new Nature for Climate Fund from HM Treasury. The England Tree Strategy will help inform how elements of this £640million fund will be used to deliver against the manifesto tree planting commitments, alongside peatland restoration and wider nature recovery.
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Forestry Minister Lord Goldsmith commented: “In many ways the coronavirus pandemic has shone a light on the importance of nature. Growing and protecting our nation’s forests will be an integral part of our recovery, and the England Tree Strategy will give us the tools to do this.”
Visit the Consultation Pages
The consultation is focussed on four main areas:
Expanding and connecting trees and woodlands by:
increasing the supply of planting material, the size of the forestry workforce and encouraging collective agreement from stakeholders to obtain widespread support for woodland creation providing farmers and other landowners and managers with the right incentives through improving grant funding and simplified application processes working with partners to increase tree cover across public land encouraging private investment in woodland creation by helping to develop the market for the ecosystem services generated as trees grow expanding tree and woodland cover to contribute to the Nature Recovery Network, which aims to create or restore 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat.
Protecting and improving our trees and woodlands by:
building the capacity of the domestic UK nursery sector to ensure planting stock is bio-secure and from a known provenance reducing damage to woodlands through the sustainable management of invasive species
stronger protection for ancient woodland sites, building on newly proposed measures of the Environment Bill which give communities a greater say in the protection of local trees increasing the percentage of woodlands in active management adapting treescapes and woodlands to the future climate and maximising the benefits they can provide to support adaptation measures, such as natural flood management and helping improve the resilience of wildlife.
Engaging people with trees and woodland by:
providing more and better-quality green infrastructure – including in urban areas – to make towns and cities attractive places to live and work and bring about long-term improvements in people’s health supporting Community Forests to create new woodlands and facilitate access to existing woodlands closer engagement with the education and health sectors, developing skills and expertise in the forestry sector to support health programmes through social prescribing.
Supporting the economy by:
growing the market for wood products, and supporting and upskilling farmers and land managers to add trees to their business supporting the sustainable timber industry and increasing the use of all domestic forest products including timber and forest biomass for energy designing grants and clearer policy to increase the uptake of agroforestry.
Visit the government’s England Tree Strategy consultation webpages
June 13, 2020
Reviews for Tall Trees Short Stories
Two early reviews for Tall Trees Short Stories have been posted this week.
Publishing a book is a very personal experience for an author. When first read by others it feels akin to exposing your soul to the world. So it’s very much more than simple relief you feel when learning for the first time that others like what you’ve written.
so enthralling . . . some may make you cry, others will raise a smile
Marie Owyn
The book is published 30th June and available in all good bookshops in paperback and ebook. If you can’t wait til then, head over to my shop and buy a copy direct from me.
Living Woods
Living Woods magazine included a long extract of one of the stories for their readers, remarking:
Equally important is the message behind the tales, that of the need to care for the environment around us, especially our trees. Gabriel uses all the advantages of fiction to push this message home, using an amusing and often quirky angle to examine more serious issues.
Living Woods, June 2020
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Living Woods, June 2020
Marie Owyn
Writer, award-winning blogger and garden designer Marie Owyn applied for an advanced review copy of the book in March, and posted her review on her blog this week.
Coming to this book of stories with a theme of trees and forests I was looking forward to reading and reviewing. But I encountered a problem. The Tall Trees Short Stories tales were so enthralling that my pen and notebook were left untouched. Instead I wandered through sylvan trails wondering where I would I next find myself.
Marie Owyn
Reviews Wanted
I am still interested in receiving book reviews. If you review books and prepared to write an honest review for a magazine or membership organisation, or write your own blog, read more and get in touch.
June 6, 2020
Climate Matching Tool Launched
Two UK government bodies responsible for the care of trees and forests have released a new tool to illustrate projected climate change for anywhere in Europe.
The new Climate Matching Tool has been developed by Forest Research and the Forestry Commission. It uses three climatic variables to match a future climate projection for your location with the best fitting current climate for a set of date ranges. Users can choose between 10-year or 30-year periods of monthly mean precipitation, average temperature, and diurnal temperature range.
[image error] A screenshot from the Climate Match website showing where projected (2071-79) temperature for my hometown (Oxford, UK) is currently found. In this case, the result indicates the strongest match with areas of Northern France and the east coast of Italy.
The climate matching tools gives land managers an accessible method to demonstrate what the projected climate of a site may be like in the future, by suggesting similar analog areas in the current climate. The results can be used to help with forestry or other crop species choice, and in devising resilient land management systems. It will help practitioners begin to plan adaptation responses to climate change.
The tool is simple to use and works very smoothly
The tool is simple to use and works very smoothly. I like that the user can explore both where their climate envelope will migrate in future, and where the projected future climate envelope is currently located. I would have liked to see more options though, including some downloadable outputs, both map and text-based.
In striving for simplicity, the designers have necessarily projected annual mean temperate and precipitation. However, we know that both these are projected to change differently within and between future seasons. For example, in future much of the UK is thought likely to suffer from wetter winters and drier summers. These important aspects are not modelled in this tool but are important aspects for the land manager is seeking to design resilient woodlands. It is possible to select specific months under the ‘advance’ option, but it requires multiple searches with different month selections to gain a clear idea of the scenarios being modelled.
The most useful future development would be an option to start layering individual tree species responses on top of the climate scenarios (although this is available through the rather complex ESC Tool). For example, where does Robinia pseudoacacia currently thrive, and would it fit with the projected future climate for where I live? Quercus robur currently grows well near me, but where is it likely to thrive in future? Perhaps the team may be able to do this for us in the near future while still keeping the user-friendly design.
My rating:
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Visit the Climate Match website: www.climatematch.org.uk
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June 4, 2020
Blooming Brilliant
A short trailer for Tall Trees Short Stories.
Now available to order from all good book sellers, and from my Shop.
Also available online from Hive (supporting local bookshops).
Watch more films featuring Tall Trees Short Stories
June 2, 2020
Do environmental worldviews and distrust in science affect those who care for our land?
This is the title of a guest blog that I wrote for BMC, part of the Springer group of academic publishers, published today.
The blog was based on a scientific paper published in May in the journal Small-Scale Forestry, which is sponsored by the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO).
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Do environmental worldviews and distrust in science affect those who care for our land?
Click to read full blog on BMC website
May 31, 2020
Inequality of Woodland Distribution across Britain
People living in Britain have some of the fewest trees per person anywhere in the world (see global data). But what about the distribution of trees within Britain? Due to the inequality of distribution, on average most British people have even fewer trees and woodlands, unless they live in rural Scotland and a small selection of other locations.
I used Westminster parliamentary constituency to divide Britain into 632 areas.
Constituency locations across Britain, with colour indicating woodland cover (red low/green high), and size indicating woodland area per person
I then compiled a map of Britain (sadly there’s poor data for Northern Ireland) and merged several data sets to indicate how well-off people are for woodlands in each constituency across Britain. See above and below (both maps are interactive – explore with your mouse).
Key Facts
Only one constituency has relatively excellent levels of woodland cover, attaining the maximum percentile: Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross with 3.2 hectares per person, thanks to a relatively high woodland cover (14.6%) and low human population (60,554).The data was heavily skewed by this constituency (see piechart above), the median across all data being 0.008 ha hectares per person, given 7.8% woodland cover and 100,838 people per constituency. Assuming a mean of 80 trees per hectare in a mature woodland, there are 0.32 trees per person, or one tree between three people.172 constituencies have poor levels of woodland cover, an average of 0.004ha per person. This could equate to one tree for every 31 people.146 constituencies have very poor levels of woodland cover, with an average of 0.001ha per person. This could equate to one tree for every 125 people.Together (last two facts) that means that 34 million Britain’s have poor to very poor levels of trees and woodland.The constituencies with the most people per area of woodland were Luton South (ranked 632), Hackney North (631), and Bradford West (630).The constituencies with the least people per area of woodland were Na h-Eileanan an Iar (ranked 1st), North East Cambridesire (2nd), and Runnymede and Waybridge (3rd).
Below is an interactive map of Britain showing the relative proportion of trees and woodlands per person per constituency, with pop-out additional data.
Explore this interactive map to reveal more information. Zoom in to find a particular constituency. Click on a constituency icon to reveal more data. A key is available top left. Click top right to make view full screen.
So What?
The lack of trees and woodlands affects so many aspects of our lives (e.g. lower house prices, increased risk of seasonal flooding, proven impacts on our health and wellbeing, clean air and water) and the resilience of the natural environment (e.g. poor habitats for wildlife).
While we may be some way from parliamentary elections in the UK, most of us will have the advantage of having time to start lobbying our local MPs for more trees where we live. If you use this information to lobby your MP, let me know!
About the Data
Woodland indicators by parliamentary constituency, Woodland Trust, 2019. This defines a woodland as an area with trees 0.5ha or larger.Westminster Parliamentary Constituency boundaries 2017.Population data, Office for National Statistics (England & Wales, 2017; Scotland, 2018).
May 30, 2020
May 26, 2020
New Research Shows Worldviews and Distrust Influences Land Owners
A new paper published this month demonstrates a clear relationship between the prevailing ecological worldviews of land owners and their distrust in policy, and their willingness to adopt practices that will help adaptation to environmental change.
I co-authored the paper with colleagues Forest Research and the University of Oxford which explored how forest owners are responding to the challenges of managing for environmental change.
We used the New Ecological Paradigm, which is also the basis for my Ecotypes project, to understand ecological worldviews, and explored respondents’ distrust in policy, practice, and research in supporting their land management activities.
Ambrose-Oji, B., Atkinson, M., Petrokofsky, G. and Hemery, G. (2020). Do Environmental Worldviews and Distrust Influence Action for Adaptation to Environmental Change Among Small-Scale Woodland Managers? Small-Scale Forestry (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-020-09440-x
Abstract
Forest and woodland owners and managers are generally perceived to be acting slowly in addressing environmental change by adapting their forestry practice. Diversification of tree species composition and stand structure is widely promoted as one adaptive approach to increasing the resilience of forests to climate change and other threats. Land manager behaviour is known to be affected by structural and psychological barriers to action. This study used data from a national survey and qualitative interviews among different types of forest owners and managers in the UK, including large- and small-scale woodland managers, to explore their intention to make changes to their forest management and the uptake of species diversification as an adaptation practice. The revised New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) was applied as a measure of worldview, which helped to explain some aspects of their decisions to take up diversification as an action to increase resilience. There were significant interactions between NEP and discredence—i.e. distrust in science or policy recommendations—and woodland size and the uptake of diversification. Many small-scale woodland managers hold strong ecological worldviews which can act against active adaptation because of a belief in the power of nature to adapt, or a mistrust of applying recommendations which might represent “doing the wrong thing”. Research and policy processes that involve owners and managers are more likely to incorporate these climate change rationalities and adaptation logics. The framing, salience and robustness of climate change adaptation information emerges as important for all forest owners and managers and requires additional attention by scientists and policy makers.
See my other Technical Publications
May 22, 2020
May 14, 2020
The Forest Has Something to Share
Gabriel Hemery’s latest book Tall Trees Short Stories, published next month, has been revealed today by the forest.
Let your imagination grow and prepare for a thrilling silvan adventure in this remarkable multi-genre collection of tree stories. Look out for love and loss, brace for dystopia and utopia, and jump forwards and backwards in time, but beware as you follow the path through the dark forest, nature can have a sting in its tale.
Tall Trees Short Stories is a collection of more than 25 extraordinary tales exploring the natural world and our relationship with it, written by environmentalist and celebrated tree author Gabriel Hemery.
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Published 30th June. Preorder today.
Pre-order your copy (ebook or paperback) today from my shop. Also available to order online from Amazon and from all good bookshops.
Gabriel Hemery
I’m a silvologist—or forest scientist—and a published author. I’m also a keen amateur photographer with a passion for tr ...more
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