Mapping new woodlands

Issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and timber security have prompted UK governments to set woodland expansion targets, backed by public funding to incentivise landowners to create new woodland. Woodland creation brings benefits, but also costs, especially when poorly located.

Woodland creation is largely 'applicant-led'; it tends to happen where landowners want it, but not necessarily where it makes most strategic sense.

This analytical project will examine the kinds of places affected by recent woodland creation, and by extension those likely to be affected in the future (assuming woodland creation continues to occur in similar places). This will help us understand how far the current system creates potential conflicts between objectives, and how well it aligns with official opportunity/sensitivity maps which attempt to avoid such conflicts.

1) Using a combination of National Forest Inventory and Land Cover Map data, create a spatio-temporal inventory of recent woodland creation across all 4 UK nations.
2) Compile potential explanatory variables, including prior land cover, soil type, agricultural land capability, predicted timber growth rate, and distance to nearest road.
3) Build a per-country predictive model of how these variables influence the probability of woodland creation.
4) Predict the likely location of future woodland creation and compare against the distribution of sensitive species and official woodland opportunity/sensitivity maps.