CCFG will be hosting their next webinar – Woodland Ecosystems and Carbon – with Tom Crowther and Kate Holl – on Thursday 16th October at 4pm BST. 

The relationship between woodland ecosystems and carbon is a complicated but increasingly important one, with many European countries now proritising sustainable forest management as a way of building resilience to climate change and pests and diseases. Our autumn webinar will be a fascinating discussion with Thomas Crowther and Kate Holl.

Thomas Ward Crowther is a professor of ecology and the founding co-chair of the advisory board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He is the head of Crowther Lab, an interdisciplinary research group exploring the role of biodiversity in regulating Earth’s climate. In 2020 he founded Restor, an international organization that supports hundreds of thousands of local community-restoration initiatives across the globe. He was a finalist in Prince William’s earthshot prize, and the world economic forum recognized him as a young global leader for his contributions to global nature conservation.

Kate Holl has been a woodland advisor with NatureScot and its predecessors for almost 40 years, specialising in assessing woodland habitat condition, particularly the evaluation of herbivore impacts in natural woodland. She is a joint author of the Woodland Herbivore Impact Assessment method, and in 2017 under a Churchill Fellowship, travelled widely within the North Eastern Atlantic bioregion to learn about the flora of woodlands less impacted by herbivores.

 

To book your place please visit this link. 

CCFG will be hosting their next webinar – Biomass – Fuel – Silviculture: The role of CCF in fire prevention- with Alex Held – on Thursday 23rd January 2025 4-5.30pm.

Weather permitting, all biomass can become fuel for a wildfire. Fire spread is determined by the fire behaviour influencing factors: weather, topography, and fuels. While we foresters cannot modify weather nor topography, biomass (fuel) we can indeed modify and with this have positive or negative influence on fire spread, fire intensity and its severity and negative effects. CCF is providing a toolbox of silvicultural measures to increase our forests resilience in that regard.

Alexander Held holds an MSc in Forest Science from Freiburg University, Germany. He started as a fire ecologist at the Fire Ecology working group of the Max-Planck Society, got a number of operational qualifications in the US and South Africa. He moved from fire ecology to fire management and worked with the Global Fire Monitoring Center GFMC in Europe and Southern Africa. Later, Alex worked with the South African Working on Fire Program, from its early beginnings till 2012, when he joined EFI.

At EFI, Alex works on the current project Waldbrand-Klima-Resilienz, where the exchange of expertise and knowledge, mutual assistance and cooperation in Europe is the tool to create more resilient landscapes and better-informed fire management for Germany. His expertise is in fire management, silviculture and deer management for resilient forests.

See examples of Alex’s work in media here.

To book your place please visit this link. 

Continuous Cover Forestry Question Time – CCFQT2

Please join us for our second online CCF question time on Thursday 21st November at 4pm. Our Chair, Jonny Hulson, will be joined by a panel of foresters: Hazel Cowan, Andrew Leslie and David Pengelly. The panel members will reply to questions about any aspect of CCF. The questions can either be provided in advance or posted during the session (the panel would appreciate some advance notice of as many questions as possible!).

• • Hazel Cowan has been a forest manager for over 25yrs working mainly in the north of Scotland on private estates for Cawdor Forestry Ltd. She has been fortunate to have worked in forests where she has been able to practice CCF, almost exclusively with Scots pine using group selection systems or strip felling. Hazel has learnt that CCF requires a lot of patience and that you don’t always get it right first time! She’s also starting to underplant larch and initiate regeneration of Douglas fir.
  • Andrew Leslie is a forestry educator and researcher with more than thirty five years’ experience across a range of jobs and countries. He has managed silvicultural research in the UK and in Somalia, Lesotho, Vanuatu and Guyana covering natural forest through to plantations and temperate to tropical and across a range of different cultural environments. Currently Andrew is part of a team at Forest Research conducting silvicultural and wood properties research, with specific responsibility for CCF, short rotation forestry and species mixtures. For twenty four years he led the development and management of undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses in forestry, delivered through part-time, distance-learning and full-time teaching at the National School of Forestry.
  • David Pengelly is a fellow of the ICF. Having worked in the forestry industry since the 1980’s and operated as an independent manager and consultant since 1997, he has considerable experience in a broad range of forestry related issues. David’s client base includes large estates, voluntary organisations, public sector and smaller privately owned woodlands, covering a range of forest and woodland types. David has particular expertise in timber harvesting and marketing. He is a director of SelectFor Ltd and Partner of D&H Pengelly Forestry & Agi-environment Consultants. David is responsible for several properties where owners’ objectives are met through the long-term application of Continuous Cover Forestry principles, resulting in the emergence of well-developed permanently irregular stand structures.

This is a second event along the lines of the previous event held in March this year, with a slightly longer timeslot. Booking is essential, please use this link. 

 

Following the webinar on 23rd May with Victoria Stokes talking about an experiment in underplanting in conifers at Clocaenog Forest, a recording has now been made available on  YouTube which you can view using this link.  

 

CCFG will be hosting their next webinar – Underplanting of conifers in Britain – with Victoria Stokes – on Thursday 23rd May 2024 4-5pm.

Underplanting is a relatively little-used technique for establishing trees while avoiding the disadvantages of clearfelling and may become increasingly important where a change of species is desirable. This webinar will report results from an underplanting experiment in the long-running CCF trial area at Clocaenog Forest in North Wales. Survival and growth of five different conifer species planted under a mature Sitka spruce overstorey will be compared. Impacts of the subsequent thinning operations and the final overstorey removal on survival of the underplanted seedlings will be presented, and responses of the five species to the removal of the overstorey 9 years after planting will be examined. Some operational “lessons learned” will also be highlighted.

Victoria is a Senior Scientist in the Silviculture and Wood Properties Science Group at Forest Research. She has over 20 years’ experience in carrying out research on management of Britain’s forests to increase resilience to climate change and biotic threats, whilst maintaining productivity. She leads research on Upland Silviculture, focussing on management techniques which increase tree species diversity and stand age structure, such as Continuous Cover Forestry. She has contributed to many collaborative projects and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Foresters.

To book your place please visit this link. 

Following the webinar on 21st March with Danny Alder talking about the biodiversity research project on the Rushmore Estate on the Dorset-Wiltshire border looking at the responses of woodland birds, bats and woodland plants to different stand management, a recording has now been made available on  YouTube which you can view using this link. 

You can also watch Andy Poore’s talk on Applying CCF in Lowland Broadleaved Woods, which also refers to the Rushmore Estate, but was recorded in October 2021. 

CCFG will be hosting their next webinar – Biodiversity responses to transformation to irregular high forest – with Danny Alder – on Thursday 21st March 2024 4-5pm.

Danny’s talk will be about the biodiversity research project on the Rushmore Estate on the Dorset-Wiltshire border looking at the responses of woodland birds, bats and woodland plants to different stand management with a particular focus on the introduction of irregular high forest management.

The forest manager at Rushmore is Andy Poore, a founder member of CCFG, who gave a webinar in 2021 – to watch Andy’s talk for more background on this site please see this link. 

Understanding how biodiversity responds to changes in the management of woodlands can be helpful to forest managers, especially in woodlands with a high nature conservation value, and more generally where the aim of forest management is to work with natural processes towards sustainable management. In this study on the Rushmore Estate, in the Cranborne Chase National Landscape, different taxonomic groups were sampled across different stand types. These included 1) traditional coppice and coppice with standards, 2) limited intervention, stands where management had effectively stopped for at least 30 years, 3) Irregular high-forest; a single tree or small group selection system which had been introduced in the 1980’s, and 4) Transitional management where stands were at the early stages of transformation towards irregular high-forest, which had come out of production and were either over-stood coppice or pole-stage, closed canopy. To help understand the responses of the different taxonomic groups it was important to look at how the structure of the woodland varied and relate these structural characteristics to the different species encountered.

The talk will highlight the study methods and main findings, and will discuss the implications of the research which has produced three peer-reviewed papers in Forest Ecology and Management. A summary technical article is due to appear in the spring of 2024 in the Quarterly Journal of Forestry.

Dr Danny Alder undertook this research towards his PhD within the Natural Sciences department at Manchester Metropolitan University. Danny lives in Dorset and is an ecologist working in countryside management. He has a special interest in conservation ecology and research focusing on woodlands and their management.

To book your place please visit this link. 

CCFG will be hosting their next webinar – Regenerative Forestry

with Clive Thomas, Wednesday 21st February 2024 4-5pm

This online event is hosted by CCFG featuring Clive Thomas who will deliver a 30 minute presentation on this topic. This will be followed by a question and answer session for participants. 

Join this webinar to hear more and discuss the Soil Association’s Regenerative Forestry report. This report and supporting evidence was developed to inform advocacy for an approach to forestry in the UK founded on goals of integration, resilience, restoration, engagement and reward. Download the report ahead of the webinar to learn more.

Regenerative Forestry Report (soilassociation.org)

Clive Thomas is Soil Association’s senior adviser for forestry, leading on regenerative forestry including the integration of trees and woodland management into farming systems, as well as policy development in response to voluntary carbon and natural capital markets. Clive is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Foresters and has worked in private and state forestry sectors during a 30+ year career managing forests and developing forest policy.

 

 

 

 

 

Continuous Cover Forestry Question Time – CCFQT

Please join us for our inaugural online CCF question time. Our Chair, Bill Mason, will be joined by a panel of foresters: Phil Morgan, Gareth Browning, and Ben Walker. The panel members will reply to questions about any aspect of CCF. The questions can either be provided in advance or posted during the session.

• Phil Morgan, past chairman of CCFG and president of ProSilva, manages upland transformation and specialises in inventory and CCF training.
• Gareth Browning has looked after the nation’s forests across North and West Cumbria for over 30 years. He has been the driving force behind the development of CCF in a number of forests around Bassenthwaite Lake and is a passionate founding partner in Wild Ennerdale. Gareth has been experimenting with thinning approaches, underplanting and steep ground working. For services to forestry and nature recovery Gareth was honoured with an MBE in the Kings first birthday honours list last year.
• Ben Walker has been working with trees since his first job in a tree nursery aged 14. Since then he has worked for woodland charities, social enterprises and estates, in both practical and management roles. Ben primarily creates and manages CCF woodlands for their environmental and timber resources, and currently is working as the forester for Raincliffe Woods Community Enterprise, alongside engaging in consultancy for estates and the NCFed.

This is an experimental session; if it is successful we may hold more sessions in future. 

 

Following the second webinar of the 2023-24 season on 23rd November, with Gary Kerr, a recording has now been made available on YouTube which you can view using this link.