Research
Behaviour of private landowners and managers
Research Status:current
This long term programme of research aims to provide insights about the motivations, decision-making processes and actions of owners, managers and businesses to support woodland creation and resilient forest management.
Around 75% of forest land in Great Britain is owned privately. A majority of these private owners have holdings of less than 10 hectares in size. If they do not manage the forest themselves, owners use small scale private contractors and businesses to undertake forestry operations. As well as considering existing woodland, national governments have identified the need to expand forest cover through the creation of new woodland. Private owners of land, including farmers, are a key target. Understanding the behaviour of so many owners, managers and businesses presents a significant challenge to those organisations and agencies looking to support woodland creation, sustainable and resilient forest management, as well as those developing measures and strategies to influence behaviour.
Understanding different kinds of owners and managers
Forest resilience: Understanding and action
Uptake and impact of advice
Ambrose-Oji, B., 2019, Characterising land managers to support woodland creation efforts in Scotland, Research Summary produced for Forestry Scotland and the Central Scotland Green Network.
Ambrose- Oji, B., Atkinson, G. and Petr, M. 2019. Woodland managers’ understanding of resilience and their future information needs. Research Note FCRN036, Forestry Commission, Edinburgh, p. 10.
Ambrose- Oji, B., Atkinson, G., Pecurul, M. and Petr, M. 2018. Differentiating between land managers for understanding of “resilience”, and factors influencing decision-making. Forest Research, Farnham, Surrey, p. 38.
O’Brien, L., Ambrose-Oji, B., Hemery, G., Petrokofsky, G., and Raum, S. 2018, Payments for ecosystem services, land manager networks and social learning. Forest Research, Farnham
Hemery, G, Petrokofsky, G, Ambrose-Oji, B, Edwards, D, O’Brien, L, Tansley, C and Townsend, M 2018 Shaping the Future of Forestry: Report of the British Woodlands Survey 2017. Sylva Foundation, Oxford.
Atkinson, G and Ambrose- Oji, B 2017 What do forest managers want to know about adaptation? Forest Research, Farnham, Surrey.
Ambrose- Oji, B., Pecurul, M., and O’Brien, L., 2017, Understanding small woodland owners and managers in the UK: Evidence to promote resilient behaviour change? Presentation at IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress international conference Freiburg, September 18th – 22nd 2017
Ambrose- Oji, B & Tidey, P, 2017, Woodland Creation Grant Uptake Study. Forest Research report to Forestry Commission England. 30pp
Ambrose- Oji, B., 2016, Reaching New Audiences. Evaluation of knowledge events for small forestry businesses. Forest Research report to Forestry Commission England. 61pp
Hemery, G., Petrokofsky, G., Ambrose-Oji, B., Atkinson, G., Broadmeadow, M., Edwards, D., Harrison, C., Lloyd, S., Mumford, J., O’Brien, L., Reid, C., Seville, M., Townsend, M., Weir, J., and Yeomans, A., 2015, Awareness, action and aspiration amongst Britain’s forestry community relating to environmental change: Report of the British Woodlands Survey 2015. 32pp
Outputs (2010-2014)
Landowners’ attitudes to woodland creation and management in the UK: a review of current evidence
Prospects for new productive woodland in Scotland: Insights from stakeholders
Human dimensions of adaptive forest management
Woodfuel: social and economic dimensions
This research work is ongoing as part of Forest Research’s current Science and Innovation Strategy and cuts across Programme 1, Programme 3 and Programme 4.
Work on this research is funded by the Forestry Commission Great Britain, Forestry Commission England, and the devolved Forestry Commission organisations. Partners include the Sylva Foundation.
Forestry Commission policy
Devolved forestry policy is widely committed to supporting forestry on private land, expanding the woodland resource, and ensuring resilient forest management amongst forest and woodland owners, managers and businesses. Policy support is set out in the following documents:
Defra and Forestry Commission England’s policy statement and Corporate Plan
NRW and Welsh Government’s Woodlands for Wales and Action Plan
Cost-effective landscaping and greenspace development require detailed studies of site ecology and history along with its physical and chemical liabilities, opportunities and constraints. Brownfield sites require extra surveys to inform decontamination procedures and the preservation of industrial archaeology and important ecological habitats. Forest Research tested a range of techniques in the field to draw up a set of recommended procedures for brownfield site investigations.
This research began in 2003 and was completed in 2007.
The Forest Research team trialled a range of on-site investigation techniques and approaches. This field work fed into the team’s development of an environmental impact assessment framework for urban pollution as part of a larger collaborative research project to develop a conceptual framework for pollutants in the urban environment.
Urban Regeneration and Greenspace Partnership
Increasing timber production from small private woodlands in England: effectiveness of initiatives (PDF-243 KB)
MOTIVE (PDF-218 KB)
Summary of research investigating adaptation to climate change amongst private sector woodland managers in Wales.
Prospects for new productive woodland in Scotland:insights from stakeholders (2014) (PDF-3008 KB)
Is the private forest sector adapting to climate change? A study of forest managers in north Wales
Annals of Forest Science, Volume 71, March 2014
Private landowners’ approaches to planting and managing forests in the UK: What’s the evidence? Land Use Policy, Volume 36, January 2014
Interventions to increase timber production (PDF- 5Mb) (2013) & Appendices (PDF-2 MB)
Land-manager Identification and Engagement for Forestry (PDF-503 KB)
Brief research summary including background, objectives, methods, findings and recommendations.
Land-manager Networks and Segmentation (PDF-455 KB)
Brief research summary including background, objectives, methods, findings and recommendations.
Land Management Networks Project Work Package 1 Final Report: Landscape Scale Method to Identify and Engage Land Managers (PDF-3948 KB)
Research report describing and testing a systematic method for the identification and engagement of private landowners for forestry at the landscape scale.
Land Management Networks Project Work Package 2 Final Report: Network Analysis and Segmentation (PDF-1737 KB)
Research report providing an outline network analysis of professional forestry social networks and scoping a segmentation approach based on land manager’s connectivity within these networks. This research uses data relating to the Northern Devon Nature Improvement Area.
Understanding private land-manager decision-making: A framework for forestry (PDF-1120 KB)
Full report of research aimed at providing a framework within which to understand the complexities of private land-management decision-making.
Developing effective methods for identifying woodland owners: an Oxfordshire pilot study (PDF-4857K)
A study aimed at identifying and demonstrating cost and time efficient methods of identifying woodland owners.
Currently no technique to determine the ecotoxicological impact of soil-borne contaminants to trees or landscape flora exists. This means that a significant proportion of expenditure from a reclamation budget is used to clean-up contamination to generic levels. This is unnecessary, environmentally and financially costly, and often leads to a reduced quality of the final landscape. In addition, traditional methods of assessing the phytoavailability of potentially toxic elements in soils are difficult to interpret and are often contradictory.
This research began in 2003 and is due for completion in 2007.
Forest Research in collaboration with ARUP, aims to develop and refine a biological indicator methodology for assessing the feasibility and risk-benefit of direct vegetation establishment on contaminated land.
The main objectives are:
Plant, tree, soil and water testing
Forest Research is a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Pollutants in the Urban Environment (PUrE) Research Consortium.
The mission of this EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Pollutants in the Urban Environment (PUrE) Research Consortium project is to enable valid and transparent assessments of sustainable development scenarios by providing an improved scientific understanding of the behaviour and impacts of pollutants in the urban environment.
This will be achieved through the development of a decision-support framework capable of integrating the three critical steps defined by the consortium partners:
The PUrE framework will consist of three levels for problem analysis: Simple, Generic and Detailed.
Forest Research is responsible for the development of the Ecological Impacts Assessment framework within the overall framework and software platform.
We are involved with three aspects of the overall project:
The PUrE consortium is funded by:
Members of the consortium include:
Members of the Steering Committee include:
This research began in 2005 and is due for completion in 2009.
Core project
This aims to establish the initial levels of the framework. These Generic and Simple levels will concentrate on the use of datasets and simple vegetation uptake models for the assessment of risk to terrestrial ecosystem receptors.
Demonstration of the PUrE framework for mixtures of pollutants
This will demonstrate steps 1 and 2 of the PUrE framework using particulate pollution as a case study, and will provide data for subsequent model development and validation.
Forest Research is responsible for assessing both the impacts of particulate pollution on terrestrial ecological receptors and the potential for using trees and other vegetation to intercept particles from air thus improving urban air quality.
More information about the demonstration of the PUrE framework
Development of models for detailed problem analysis
This will develop the more detailed levels of the framework (Simple and Detailed). It will concentrate on the use of models to predict food-chain transfer of pollutants in terrestrial urban ecosystems.
Plant, tree, soil and water testing
It is vital that we can demonstrate that the PUrE framework is able to deal with real life scenarios. This project will utilise the models, and provide data for further model development, from the development of the Ecological Impact Assessment (EIA) of pollutants in the urban environment framework to demonstrate that PUrE provides a robust modelling and decision framework for dealing with these kinds of issues.
This project will use particulate pollution as an example. The sources of particulates studied will include traffic and an industrial source.
Particulate matter contains a mixture of pollutants, but the effects have primarily been studied by size rather than by composition; therefore, research on particles could be significantly improved by applying an updated and integrated approach.
For PUrE the upper size of particles will be limited to those that can be readily transported via air dispersion or suspension in flowing water. This will involve a more thorough characterisation of the particles (e.g. chemical, physical, biological properties, etc.), mapping of sources and movements, and an integrated assessment of the associated human and ecological health effects/risks.
The Forest Research component will determine the composition and bioavailability of particulate contaminants and assess their associated risk to ecological health. There are two primary components:
This will use indicator vegetation species planted along a particulate gradient. The species selected will include those common in urban greening.
The vegetation tissue compartments will be analysed for their metal content, both before and after washing, to assess the amount of particulate adhered to the tissue surface and that transported within the plant.
In addition, a range of primary plant consumers will be used to assess the food-chain transport of particulate pollution. These will be related to air sampling data collected from the study sites.
The use of vegetation to mitigate particulate pollution has been recognised for a number of years. Models have been developed to predict the potential dry deposition of particles to urban tree planting.
This component of the project will validate and, if necessary, refine these models using air sampling data from an urban greenspace in London.
The results of this work will test existing models and refine those being developed during the development of the EIA framework and will provide a dataset for inclusion in the databases supporting the software.
Plant, tree, soil and water testing
The impacts of development, both past and future, on urban and peri-urban ecosystems must be considered during the planning process. An examination the effects on habitat destruction and fragmentation and the potential loss of biodiversity is an integral part of this process.
However, the detrimental effect of the pollutants arising from some activities on ecosystems is seldom investigated, particularly where the pollutant loading on an area may already be high from an accumulation of a number of sources or an industrial legacy.
Forest Research is currently developing the EIA component of the Pollutants in the Urban Environment (PUrE) framework to enable users to quantify the influence of pollutants in the urban environment on terrestrial ecosystem health and function.
The EIA will consist of three Levels:
These align with the tiers in the proposed Environment Agency Ecological Risk Assessment Guidance for Contaminated Land.
This iterative framework means that the user can exit the process when the objectives of the assessment have been met; i.e. when enough information has been gathered. If uncertainties are unacceptable the user progresses to the next level/s which requires more data but yields a more certain risk assessment result.
Generic level
At the Generic level the user will be able to compare measured or ‘typical’ soil concentrations with Soil Screening Values, where available, or NOEC (No Observed Effect Concentration), LOEC (Lowest Observed Effect Concentration), EC (Effect Concentration) and LC (Lethal Concentration) values from the literature.
Simple level
Depending on the outcome of the above analysis and the objectives of the user, they may then progress through a tiered structure to the Simple level, using recommended ecotoxicological tests and more complex databases containing detailed information on the derivation of the EC and LC values (e.g. soil properties, species, test conditions) and simple models to predict metal uptake into vegetation.
Detailed level
Finally, in the Detailed level, the user will be able to examine the potential for food-chain transfer of pollutants from a combination of ecotoxicological tests and models.
In addition to the above, the proposed Environment Agency guidance has a selection of toxicity tests that are recommended for the Ecological Risk Assessment process. These methods include assessments of soil microbial function, soil invertebrate function and vegetation germination and growth.
However, these tests have originally been developed for use in agricultural systems (e.g. during pesticide approval) and, as a result, often use species not indicative of those likely to be present in urban greenspace.
They also provide assessments of ecological function and do not consider the food-chain transfer of contaminants. In some species of vegetation the concentrations of a contaminant may be higher in the plant tissue than in the soil in which it is growing. This has serious implications for the long term assessment of the cycling of contaminants during litter fall which are not an issue when considering crop species.
Forest Research is currently developing a range of ecotoxicological tests that use both species relevant to urban scenarios and take into account food-chain transfer.
Science group leader