'Future Treescapes in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty' is a collaborative project that brings together the work of agricultural researchers, landscape professionals, national agencies, and local stakeholders to focus on a distinctive protected landscape: the Chiltern Hills. As in other UK AONBs, one of the area's defining features is its treescape, which is made up most characteristically of beech woodland, but includes the UK's largest coverage of native box. 88% of the Chilterns' designated priority habitats are deciduous woodland, and of the 17,588 woodland hectares within its boundaries 9,830ha (59%) are ancient. There are immediate opportunities to support the expansion of these woodlands through the planned extension of the AONB's boundaries (Natural England statutory consultation, 2024). 'Future of UK Treescapes' has three key themes: understanding holistically the form, value and function of UK woodland; exploring barriers and pathways towards its expansion; increasing the resilience of UK treescapes to global pressures. All three are currently of urgent significance to the Chilterns. For FTAONB, treescape investigators from the University of Reading have joined with the Chilterns Conservation Board to co-design a programme of knowledge exchange around these pressing challenges and opportunities. Their plan centres on a series of workshops at which both partners will introduce their wider circles of collaborators to a newly extended network of treescape researchers, landscape practitioners, and conservation/NGO professionals. The exchange of knowledge at these workshops will be broadened further, crucially, through FTAONB's consultation with hard-to-reach professionals in the agricultural and land management sectors, upon whose involvement the larger agendas of the project ultimately depend. The project is designed, furthermore, so that its landscape-specific identification of knowledge requirements and research provisions can be scaled up from the local context of the Chilterns to the larger, national context of the other 45 UK AONBs. The FTAONB project team will produce a series of statement documents and information tools at each of its collaborative stages, using an iterative process of composition, consultation and revision. Stage 1 will produce an initial research needs statement, followed by practice notes from the first workshop, elaborated into an attractive and impactful infographic document. At Stage 2 we will deploy the infographic practice notes in consultations with local stakeholders (facilitated by the CCB through their farm cluster programme), and seek to revise and extend them in the light of these conversations. At Stage 3 we will assess the scope for scaling up the practice notes to more general UK treescape contexts, finally prototyping a toolkit document of UK Treescape research applications. This toolkit will form the centrepiece of a searchable, online knowledge hub, containing educational materials on the expansion and preservation of UK treescapes, to be hosted on the Tree Council website. For the CCB, the legacy of its work on FTAONB is the material that it will feed into the Chilterns AONB 2025-2030 management plan, and the foundations it will lay for a new Chilterns Woodland Strategy document.

In recent years environmental and social scientists working with economists have begun to understand the value that nature provides to society. These 'ecosystem services' (ES) include things like the provisioning of food and fuel, regulating water quality and quantity, reducing pollution, storing carbon and producing landscapes and features of cultural and aesthetic significance. Using a range of widely agreed methods it has been possible to put economic values on these services and the stock of ES is referred to as 'natural capital'. These ideas have allowed nature to be included in the way that organisations and societies plan and make decisions. Economic development, for example, that erodes natural capital might be considered undesirable, especially if the loss of natural capital outweighs the benefit of the development. Another term, 'green infrastructure' (GI) is used to describe the natural or semi-natural features such as hedgerows, parkland and street trees that make up part of human landscapes. GI can provide ecosystem services and therefore adds to natural capital. Urban trees, for example, regulate water flow, take in carbon dioxide, can reduce air pollution and have cultural significance. Although these ideas are well developed in theory, applying them in practice has proved more challenging because the data required to calculate ES valuations are not widely available and the methods used are complex. This is a barrier to governments and businesses understanding and using these important ideas in their planning and decision making, and more so for individual citizens, small organisations or community groups who might be interested in the real value of their environment. The VITAL project is made up of environmental scientists from the Open University with experience of running large citizen science projects, specialists in ES and trees from Forest Research, and Treeconomics a social enterprise which has been instrumental in engaging organisations in valuing their trees. We aim to develop a system that allows anyone from individual citizens to local authorities, businesses and large organisations to value the trees around them. We will significantly improve an existing OU citizen science tool: 'Treezilla' which allows users to map and gives ES valuations of trees, so that it links with the most widely used professional system for ES tree valuation: i-Tree Eco. These improvements will give all users access to powerful tools for valuing trees. We will engineer these systems such that data from one feeds into the other, and as more data are collected in Treezilla, it is used to refine the system further. The value of our tools will be in their use by large numbers of people and organisations, so we have partnered with key organisations with interests in the value of trees in their environment to deliver the project. We will work closely with the Parks Trust Milton Keynes who are responsible for GI in one of Britain's most wooded cities, to understand how organisations can use Treezilla, using what we learn to improve training and promotion of Treezilla to other users. We will then work closely with a major governmental organisation: Natural Resources Wales to deliver specific projects demonstrating the use of Treezilla to that organisation and others like it. Through a third partnership, with The Tree Council, which has tens of members made up of local authorities, community groups and small and large charities, and supports a national network of 8000 volunteer Tree Wardens, we will communicate our tools and what we have learned to a very large number of potential users. These, and all users of Treezilla, will have free and open access to tools for valuing trees and the same access to a massive and growing dataset of trees and tree valuations from across the UK.

Due to the need for climate change action, UK Government has committed to the ambitious task of achieving 'net zero' greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. However, some emissions from farming, aviation and other activities are very difficult to eliminate. So to reach net zero the UK must also directly remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere amounting to the equivalent of 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide/year. Of the Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) options available, increasing the carbon stored in the UK's 'treescapes' (forests, hedgerows etc.) has the greatest potential, the lowest cost, and can be started immediately. Planting woodlands can store carbon in standing trees, in forest soils and in timber products. For these reasons, the UK is committed to a huge increase in forest cover. However, our understanding of all these processes and how they vary across locations and over time is incomplete. This major programme will gather evidence, address knowledge gaps and allow decision makers to understand the GGR consequences of different planting options. Woodlands can also deliver many other benefits, creating habitats to conserve wild species, enhancing water quality, regulating rainfall and reducing flood risk, and providing recreation (hence the "GGR+" title). GGR+ will examine all the diverse aspects of forestry to identify "The Right Tree in the Right Place". However, it is equally possible to plant the wrong tree in the wrong place. This can result in damage to biodiversity, and even cause some soils to release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Also, if certain types of agriculture are displaced, there could be higher imports of food from countries that destroy rainforests to increase farm yields. On top of this, climate change means that many risks (forest fires, extreme weather, disease) are changing faster than ever. "The Right Tree in the Right Place" is not a simple proposition - if we are not careful, and don't consider the complexities properly, the UK's net zero tree planting strategy will be poorly designed, and at worst could result in forests that actually increase climate change. However, even understanding the consequences of planting in different locations is not enough to plan the future of the UK's forests. Land is typically privately owned and Government cannot dictate its use. Rather they need to create the conditions and incentives needed for owners to decide to plant trees. Consequently, GGR+ will also undertake the economic research needed to turn science advice into practice. This challenge cannot be addressed by scientists alone, and the GGR+ partners include UK land use policy makers, including all of the Forestry authorities, the Defra teams responsible for forestry, climate and agriculture (who will use GGR+ to plant 30,000ha/year), as well as the Ministry of Defence (which has huge land holdings). From the private and NGO sectors our partners include massive land owners such as Network Rail and the National Trust (who together will fund over 74,000ha of planting based on GGR+ advice), as well as a network of over 1,400 farmers, the timber and building sector and many other stakeholders. Together with our partners, GGR+ will design innovative "decision support tools"; bespoke software allowing users to examine the effects of a tree planting investment or policy in terms of greenhouse gas storage, food production, incomes of those involved, effects on biodiversity, water quality, flooding, recreation etc. Perhaps most revolutionary, this tool will allow users to specify what outcomes they want and then see what planting, policy or investments they need to get those outcomes. This is an exciting, highly interdisciplinary approach to answering the surprisingly challenging question of finding "The Right Tree in the Right Place" and setting the UK on the path to delivering net zero emissions by 2050.