Tree planting has been the most common woodland expansion strategy in the UK for many decades. Despite its many benefits, this approach is increasingly being questioned following overestimates of benefits, poor targeting and challenges in scaling-up tree planting at the level required to meet ambitious woodland expansion targets. Consequently, there is growing interest in incorporating 'natural colonisation' (allowing trees to colonise new areas naturally) into woodland expansion strategies, partly because it is assumed that naturally created woodlands will be more structurally diverse, ecologically complex and resilient than planted sites. Embracing natural colonisation as a complementary approach to tree planting has the potential to radically transform UK treescapes and unlock woodland expansion at scale. Tree planting and natural colonisation may be used in complementary and blended combinations across a landscape, depending on the local conditions and the benefits expected. However, we know very little about the socio-ecological consequences of creating woodlands through approaches incorporating natural colonisation. We also have a poor understanding of land managers' attitudes towards woodland creation approaches other than tree planting, and it is not clear which kinds of land managers do, or would, engage with woodland creation through alternative approaches incorporating natural colonisation, and why. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, we will explore agricultural land managers' attitudes towards woodland creation strategies spanning the planting to natural colonisation continuum. We will also quantify the differing ecological and social consequences of these approaches, and identify factors associated with woodland resilience. Finally, we will integrate socio-ecological evidence to demonstrate how tree planting and natural colonisation can be used in combination to scale-up woodland expansion for a range of objectives on agricultural land. We will focus on broadleaf, and mixed broadleaf and conifer, woodlands created in agricultural landscapes with varying degrees of land-use intensity (from intensive arable lowland to marginal grassland on the upland fringe) and surrounding woodland cover, as these factors are likely to influence stakeholder perceptions and socio-ecological outcomes of woodland creation methods. These landscapes represent a major portion of UK land area with potential for woodland expansion. We will exploit two unique and complementary networks of woodland sites across the UK to create a novel platform from which to assess stakeholders' perceptions and socio-ecological consequences of woodland creation approaches spanning the planting to natural colonisation continuum. These sites provide a rich data resource and access to a diverse range of land-mangers. TreE_PlaNat will provide the evidence base to inform how, where, and for whom different strategies along the 'planting' to 'natural colonisation' continuum can be used to meet Government woodland expansion targets. Stakeholder organisations, including NGOs, statutory agencies and industry, are embedded in this proposal as co-applicants and project partners, demonstrating the co-development of this project and facilitating implementation of our findings.

Can green infrastructure form part of a water resources plan? How can we evaluate where the most impact from new wetlands and forests can be made? How robust are these 'natural water retention methods' (NWRM) to climate change? How much will they cost in comparison to conventional methods? These questions are currently being answered in a local context, with case studies and pilot projects well established and their outputs understood. At the national scale there has been far less work done. No model has taken the outputs of individual NWRM and formed a generalised approach which can be used to identify the costs and benefits of a range of options for new NWRM across Great Britain and mapped solutions in financial and carbon terms. This work builds on existing expertise on water resource systems modelling planning within the Oxford research group and uses the existing knowledge of project partners. The main steps in our project are: 1. Explore the knowledge of our project partners on NWRM. We will host discussions on the sites where NWRM has been used and record the accounts of how these schemes have been developed through interviewing expert project partners. We will ask about: -The cost of building, the time taken to develop the sites, and the operational costs. -The impacts that they noticed or monitored on local rivers We will compare the answers we are given with information from reports from elsewhere in the world. 2. Using this information we will make a model of the effects of NWRM on water. This will involve looking at what information on each NWRM can tell us about what the impact on water resources is going to be. 3. Having made a model of individual NWRM, we will apply this to our existing model of water resources for mainland Great Britain. This determines future available supplies and demands for each water resource zone, the management units for water resources. 4. We will investigate how climate change and population will affect the answers from Objective 3, and look at other uncertain factors such as how energy and industry demand for water might change and what happens if people use less water in future. 5. We will work with our partners throughout the project to develop practical and useful reports on our work.

There is a global biodiversity crisis driven by mounting pressures including land degradation and climate change. Within the UK, responses include the Government's 25 Year Environment Plan, which sets out a vision to secure a more biodiverse, connected and resilient landscape. The Natural Capital Committee has argued for the need to secure Net Environmental Gains, and this is a provision of the upcoming Environment Bill. A recent report from the UK Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology highlights the needs to secure our natural capital, not just to support biodiversity, but also ensure the provision of wider ecosystem services. Questions remain, however, as to how we achieve net environmental gain; what should go where? What does success look like? How long may it take to reassemble resilient communities that can reliably deliver ecosystem services? One widely adopted approach to securing net environmental gain is that of "ecological restoration". However, using specific natural and semi-natural ecosystems to define endpoints is increasingly contested, as target "pristine" states are hard to define, climate change is leading to a shifting baseline, and there is a need to restore ecosystems that are resilient to future pressures. We need a new paradigm for goal-seeking in ecological restoration which goes beyond reference systems, is agnostic as to prior assumptions of intactness, integrity and system "health", based on diagnostics of characteristics of functionally intact systems. There is an aspiration across the devolved administrations to deliver net environmental gain in biodiversity across all land uses. However, the restoration of ecological communities has been led by practitioners, with relatively little evidence gathered as to how individual restoration projects link together spatially to enhance the resilience of communities. This consortium brings together leading academic ecologists with a public sector organisation and a charity at the forefront of practical restoration activities, to extract the evidence from past activities through a natural experiment, and test resilience through manipulations. We intend to measure biodiversity, architecture and multifunctionality in ecosystems in different stages of transition from a degraded state, identify determinants and measures of complexity, and seek signals of emergent properties - especially resilience to perturbation. We have chosen grasslands and woodlands, being two major habitat types targeted for restoration programmes. Further to this we shall explore how approaches to accelerating re-integration of systems may affect emergent properties. In summary, we propose to move restoration science forward, but considering complexity and resilience as fundamental aims for restoration projects, rather than attempting to re-create specific target ecosystems.

Ecologically, culturally and economically vital, forests are both a fundamental part of our natural history and deeply rooted in our human history. These are spaces where the biology of our planet meets the structures of our societies, our bodies and our minds, constructed as much by storytellers and legal authorities as they are by ecologists, foresters and the planet itself. The roots of these cultural and historical associations are deeper and more tangled than we might imagine, particularly in the northern world. This project will be the first in-depth, multidisciplinary study of forests - and by extension trees and woods - in northern Germanic cultures. It focuses on three geographical and cultural areas: a) the Nordic world b) the Germanic-speaking peoples of the British Isles c) north-central Europe known to the Romans as Germania. 'Germanic' refers to the language group that maps onto these geographical areas; it is not in itself an ethnic or cultural signifier. By bringing together the study of three areas across a broad chronological span, I will shed light on a complex network of historical and cultural connections and influences - religious, political, artistic, literary, economic, legal - and their development over time. This project will provide new ways for understanding how historical cultures thought about and engaged with their physical environments, and what this can tell us about how humans think about the world around them and their place within it. The study begins in the 1st century BC with Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic/Civil wars, where we find some of the earliest descriptions of the northern forests of Germania. The vast Hercynian Forest formed the northern boundary of Europe in the Roman geographical imagination. Interpolated passages in the commentaries fill these forests with marvellous creatures (such as unicorns) and barbarian tribes. A century after Caesar, the historian Tacitus wrote of the cataclysmic loss of three legions in the forested badlands of Germania, with accompanying tales of human sacrifices in sacred groves. For classical authors, these impenetrable forests were synonymous with barbarism, an association that was carried over by the 'barbarians' themselves in the early medieval period. With the proliferation of source material for Northern Europe, insiders' perspectives emerge. The intersection between embodied and imaginative engagement with the forest becomes more complex, blurring into spheres including economic use, resource management, law, storytelling and religion. By the end of the medieval period (c. 1500) forests had flourished as a central topos in the literary cultures of Northern Europe, not least in the interconnected romance traditions of the British Isles, Germany and the Nordic world. The chronological endpoint of this investigation brings us up to the dawn of the early modern era, with the seeds planted for many of the significant developments of the following centuries where once again trees and forests play prominent roles (scientific enquiry, nationalism, romanticism). Today, the forest continues to flourish in our collective imagination, from the legacy of the Brothers Grimm to Tolkien's Mirkwood, from Julia Donaldson's Gruffalo to JK Rowling's Forbidden Forest. Yet while the cultural and historical potency of the forest is alive and well, the same cannot be said of the average modern Westerner's relation to it. In demonstrating how deep and tangled these roots go, I seek to expose the tension between lived experience of the forest in earlier periods, and its mediated remnants, actual destruction and unprecedented importance in an era of climate change and deforestation. Through outputs including a book, interdisciplinary workshops, and impact and outreach activities, I aim to stimulate dialogue and synergies not only across the academic disciplines but also with experts from broadcasting, ecology, heritage, education and the creative industries.

Ecologically, culturally and economically vital, forests are both a fundamental part of our natural history and deeply rooted in our human history. These are spaces where the biology of our planet meets the structures of our societies, our bodies and our minds, constructed as much by storytellers and legal authorities as they are by ecologists, foresters and the planet itself. The roots of these cultural and historical associations are deeper and more tangled than we might imagine, particularly in the northern world. This project will be the first in-depth, multidisciplinary study of forests - and by extension trees and woods - in northern Germanic cultures. It focuses on three geographical and cultural areas: a) the Nordic world b) the Germanic-speaking peoples of the British Isles c) north-central Europe known to the Romans as Germania. 'Germanic' refers to the language group that maps onto these geographical areas; it is not in itself an ethnic or cultural signifier. By bringing together the study of three areas across a broad chronological span, I will shed light on a complex network of historical and cultural connections and influences - religious, political, artistic, literary, economic, legal - and their development over time. This project will provide new ways for understanding how historical cultures thought about and engaged with their physical environments, and what this can tell us about how humans think about the world around them and their place within it. The study begins in the 1st century BC with Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic/Civil wars, where we find some of the earliest descriptions of the northern forests of Germania. The vast Hercynian Forest formed the northern boundary of Europe in the Roman geographical imagination. Interpolated passages in the commentaries fill these forests with marvellous creatures (such as unicorns) and barbarian tribes. A century after Caesar, the historian Tacitus wrote of the cataclysmic loss of three legions in the forested badlands of Germania, with accompanying tales of human sacrifices in sacred groves. For classical authors, these impenetrable forests were synonymous with barbarism, an association that was carried over by the 'barbarians' themselves in the early medieval period. With the proliferation of source material for Northern Europe, insiders' perspectives emerge. The intersection between embodied and imaginative engagement with the forest becomes more complex, blurring into spheres including economic use, resource management, law, storytelling and religion. By the end of the medieval period (c. 1500) forests had flourished as a central topos in the literary cultures of Northern Europe, not least in the interconnected romance traditions of the British Isles, Germany and the Nordic world. The chronological endpoint of this investigation brings us up to the dawn of the early modern era, with the seeds planted for many of the significant developments of the following centuries where once again trees and forests play prominent roles (scientific enquiry, nationalism, romanticism). Today, the forest continues to flourish in our collective imagination, from the legacy of the Brothers Grimm to Tolkien's Mirkwood, from Julia Donaldson's Gruffalo to JK Rowling's Forbidden Forest. Yet while the cultural and historical potency of the forest is alive and well, the same cannot be said of the average modern Westerner's relation to it. In demonstrating how deep and tangled these roots go, I seek to expose the tension between lived experience of the forest in earlier periods, and its mediated remnants, actual destruction and unprecedented importance in an era of climate change and deforestation. Through outputs including a book, interdisciplinary workshops, and impact and outreach activities, I aim to stimulate dialogue and synergies not only across the academic disciplines but also with experts from broadcasting, ecology, heritage, education and the creative industries.