About us
To better understand the natural capital assets of England’s trees and woodlands and to contribute to a wider assessment across the whole of the natural environment, our scientists, technicians, professional surveyors and remote sensing teams are delivering multiple, cutting-edge NCEA work packages.
This project uses a combination of in situ air pollution monitoring, legacy long-term data sets and modelling to evaluate both the mitigation potential and impacts of air pollution on forest ecosystems.
There is currently no national-scale bat survey of woodlands in England, Great Britain or the UK, despite bats being recognised as an important indicator of woodland ecosystem health.
In collaboration with the Bat Conservation Trust, this project aims to address this gap for England by surveying ~ 210 woodland sites each year. In addition, we are also developing suitable passive acoustic monitoring equipment for bat surveys.
This suite of projects is developing and deploying eDNA metabarcoding techniques in the routine monitoring of woodland mammals, soil biodiversity and canopy arthropod communities.
A network of 20 stream catchments representative of woodland types, management regimes and geographies across England has been established, these are sampled monthly for water quality and annually for benthic macroinvertebrates.
This project will use the data to characterise and value woodland water quality services.
This project is using Earth Observations (EO) techniques to improve the content and accuracy of NCEA data sets and to conduct research into novel uses of open source and commercial EO data to produce maps showing tree and forest related characteristics and metrics.
Our TOW map is an important product from this project, mapping all trees above 3m in height outside of woodland, including small woods, groups of trees and lone trees in England.
Approximately 30% of tree cover in England exists outside of the National Forest Inventory (NFI) woodland map. The NFI contains only woodlands > 0.5ha and therefore, until now TOW have been unmapped by Forest Research. The TOW map aims to provide geospatial data for environmental monitoring, planning, and canopy expansion.
The NCEA TOW field survey is a large-scale field survey carried out by professional surveyors and is designed to provide accurate information about the size, distribution, composition and condition of TOW and how they interact with non-woodland ecosystems.
Forest Research’s Integrated forest monitoring program is the UK’s contribution to the European International Co-operative Programme on Assessment and Monitoring of Air Pollution Effects on Forests (ICP forests). Results from ICP Forests provide the scientific basis for political decisions on air pollution controls and other areas of forest policy, such as effects of climate change.
This NCEA project expands the existing UK monitoring network from five to seven sites, allowing an assessment of the impact of environmental change on the ecosystem services provided by two key but previously missing woodland types, riparian and ancient woodland.
This project is trialling new approaches and methods of monitoring social and recreational use of woodlands using mobile phone data, social media data, people counters and acoustic monitoring. The project aims to establish the most effective approach to capture data on recreation visits and activities in forests.
The aim of the NCEA soil condition and health project is to collect high-quality chemical, physical and biological data delivering soil health indicators that are linked to soil functions and soil ecosystem services.
The project aims to develop and apply harmonised, cost-effective soil survey protocols in forestry aligned to soil monitoring systems for non-forest areas such as those in the complementary Natural England NCEA soil networks.