Climate change is a world problem. The effects of climate change are clear from the latest natural disasters in the world (e.g. summer droughts in Europe, Antarctica ice melting, and floods in India and Pakistan, among others). Arguably, the general public lacks accessible scientific information at a local level that can help them make informed decisions on how to adapt to everyday life and contribute to the future national adaptation to climate change. Forest loss or deforestation is one of the causes of contemporary climate change. Similar to weather observatories, there exist forest observatories that produce vast amounts of environmental data that require analysis and interpretation by expert scientists, usually in a way not easily digestible by the general public. Much of the scientific research on the impact of climate change on forests focuses on a limited number of intensively monitored areas. This lacks wide geographical variability, increasing the uncertainty when upscaling to a regional or national level for policy-making. We believe that offering artistic and simplified graphical/sonic interpretation of complex data and the ability to monitor nearby trees can help raise awareness of relevant issues caused by climate change to our forest ecosystem and contribute to a wider geographic data variability. The project will bring the attention of the general public to the forest changes caused by climate change. This project contributes to community building of artists, scientists and forest aficionados by debating the potentially devastating effects of climate change on forests. We hope to make a positive impact on people's opinions that can turn into policy change. The overarching research question is, how can the use of artistic and community science research methods help to inform and educate people about climate change? In particular, what can we learn from using artistic and community science research methods employing the Internet of Things (IoT), Acoustic Ecology and Creative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to monitoring forest behaviour and raising awareness about climate change? The project aims to raise awareness among forest visitors/aficionados, artists, scientists, and the general public about the connection between forests and climate change. Community building will centre on looking at a better understanding of forest behaviour using complex scientific data in creative and artistic ways. The project has three key objectives: (1) To make a one-year on-site and online artistic intervention in a UK-based forest using live scientific data and fostering acoustic ecology experiences. (2) To develop an in-house Internet of Things (IoT) prototype to measure variables related to tree stress, such as sap flow, air temperature, humidity and soil moisture to be piloted using community/citizen science methodologies connected to web applications for data analysis, visualisation and sonification. (3) To provide and disseminate tools, online resources, and pedagogic activities as well as to promote a discussion environment to foster awareness and engagement among the general public. We envision the combination of artistic and techno-scientific research methods to accomplish the project's objectives. Our methodologies are interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on finding new artistic, acoustic and audiovisual methods to understand environmental forest data. The project is novel because it brings an interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists together to work on a timely issue using an original approach to gaining knowledge about the connection between forests and climate change that can have a local, national and global impact. Both academics and non-specialists can benefit from this research. Academic fields include SMC/musicology, Human-Computer Interaction, Sonic Arts and Ecology.

Climate change is a world problem. The effects of climate change are clear from the latest natural disasters in the world (e.g. summer droughts in Europe, Antarctica ice melting, and floods in India and Pakistan, among others). Arguably, the general public lacks accessible scientific information at a local level that can help them make informed decisions on how to adapt to everyday life and contribute to the future national adaptation to climate change. Forest loss or deforestation is one of the causes of contemporary climate change. Similar to weather observatories, there exist forest observatories that produce vast amounts of environmental data that require analysis and interpretation by expert scientists, usually in a way not easily digestible by the general public. Much of the scientific research on the impact of climate change on forests focuses on a limited number of intensively monitored areas. This lacks wide geographical variability, increasing the uncertainty when upscaling to a regional or national level for policy-making. We believe that offering artistic and simplified graphical/sonic interpretation of complex data and the ability to monitor nearby trees can help raise awareness of relevant issues caused by climate change to our forest ecosystem and contribute to a wider geographic data variability. The project will bring the attention of the general public to the forest changes caused by climate change. This project contributes to community building of artists, scientists and forest aficionados by debating the potentially devastating effects of climate change on forests. We hope to make a positive impact on people's opinions that can turn into policy change. The overarching research question is, how can the use of artistic and community science research methods help to inform and educate people about climate change? In particular, what can we learn from using artistic and community science research methods employing the Internet of Things (IoT), Acoustic Ecology and Creative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to monitoring forest behaviour and raising awareness about climate change? The project aims to raise awareness among forest visitors/aficionados, artists, scientists, and the general public about the connection between forests and climate change. Community building will centre on looking at a better understanding of forest behaviour using complex scientific data in creative and artistic ways. The project has three key objectives: (1) To make a one-year on-site and online artistic intervention in a UK-based forest using live scientific data and fostering acoustic ecology experiences. (2) To develop an in-house Internet of Things (IoT) prototype to measure variables related to tree stress, such as sap flow, air temperature, humidity and soil moisture to be piloted using community/citizen science methodologies connected to web applications for data analysis, visualisation and sonification. (3) To provide and disseminate tools, online resources, and pedagogic activities as well as to promote a discussion environment to foster awareness and engagement among the general public. We envision the combination of artistic and techno-scientific research methods to accomplish the project's objectives. Our methodologies are interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on finding new artistic, acoustic and audiovisual methods to understand environmental forest data. The project is novel because it brings an interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists together to work on a timely issue using an original approach to gaining knowledge about the connection between forests and climate change that can have a local, national and global impact. Both academics and non-specialists can benefit from this research. Academic fields include SMC/musicology, Human-Computer Interaction, Sonic Arts and Ecology.

Storm Arwen was one of the most powerful and damaging winter storms of the last decade. Forest plantations on the eastern side of the UK have experienced significant damage from Storm Arwen, This offers a short-lived urgent research opportunity to lay the foundations for innovative work on both forest management for biodiversity and climate resilience and fundamental ecosystem processes. Windthrow is a natural process creating gaps at various scales in natural and production forests by snapping or uprooting, trees in localised pockets or laying over entire stands. The process of decomposition of dead wood a large flush of available nutrients, are immediate and short lived. Tree decomposition then spans decades and can lead to arboreal cavity creation or treefall dens used as nesting sites or shelter by many vertebrates. Sunlight and nutrient inputs to the soil changes and accelerates ground vegetation that may then cascade through entire ecosystems. Storm Arwen occurred at a time when Forestry England was already investigating new mechanisms to accelerate biodiversity restoration. In particular, developing resilience to expected increases in the frequency of extreme events, new pests and pathogens, and the acute need to increase carbon sequestration. Storm Arwen and the partnership underpinning this Urgency proposal, have catalysed Forestry England to commit to a potentially transformative landscape scale experiment involving the fate of windblown timber and dead wood. The objectives of this Urgency grant are: A. To co-design and implement, with Forestry England an experiment conducted at a landscape scale making use of the availability of vast areas with windblown timber to evaluate the long term biodiversity benefits of the following management prescriptions: - Windblown areas will be harvested, fallen timber recovered, followed by replanting of diversified crop and deciduous tree species (including birch, aspen, spruces, firs, pines). - Windblown areas will not be harvested, fallen timber left, with replanting (species as above). - Windblown areas will not be harvested, fallen timber left, without replanting, allowing natural regeneration (non-intervention). - Non-windblown control areas dominated by Sitka's spruce and Scot's pine. Because the process of decay will start in spring, we will urgently design and implement a program of field sample collection to provide a crucial baseline. Sampling will be focused on documenting the rates, magnitudes and spatial extents of processes that arise from retaining fallen timber. They include the eventual release of nutrients currently locked in trees, following sequestration by fungi and invertebrates feeding on dissolved organic matter, then uptake by grasses and small bushes leading, over time, to changes in the vertebrate guilds responding to vegetation and structural changes in the forest (the plantations are presently devoid of significant understory higher plants). Thus, the focus is on quantifying the magnitude and timing of the responses which remain largely unknown for coniferous trees in man-made forest plantations in an Atlantic climate. Field sampling and analytical methods are largely standard and in use at the University of Aberdeen or long-standing collaborators institutions. They will include measuring precisely the amount of dead and standing wood, the baseline nutrients in wood and in soils, the rate of wood colonisation by fungi and the speed and rates of colonisation of beetles, grasses, shrubs and trees passerine birds and woodpeckers, small mammals (mice, voles, squirrels) and focal vertebrate predators (marten and owls) to dead wood and treatments will all be assayed at the plot-level.

This research project is a collaboration between Forestry England and design-researcher Liam Healy (based at Goldsmiths, University of London), that will work in conversation with those who visit and dwell in forests to design forms of access to them. We will explore how the design of paths and trails might be harnessed to contribute to woodland health, sustainability and expansion. We see the fun and joyous experiences of being, playing, and moving through the woods as an excellent opportunity to bring diverse groups into conversations and actions around the future of forests. Spending time in and providing access to woodlands is increasingly recognised as important for physical and mental human wellbeing, but this needs to be done carefully to protect and maintain those natural places; we need to tread lightly. Since the COVID-19 pandemic Forestry England have found that visits to their woodlands have dramatically increased, and in some cases, this has brought about conflicts and new challenges. At the same time, expanding forests and woodlands has become an increasingly important means for addressing the climate emergency, and in the UK tree planting has become a key governmental policy. However, researchers have pointed out the importance of involving local communities in the process of woodland creation, planning and planting to ensure the long-term support, sustainability and care of trees. This research will investigate the ways these two factors might be harnessed so that increasing interest in access to forests can contribute to re-foresting and forest health, produce more resilient and culturally rich environments, and at the same time improve the health of visitors and forest dwellers. The research will work with local communities to design alternative forms of paths and trails that work with the health and expansion of woodlands in mind. We aim to make paths that contribute to the forest instead of destroying it by thinking about how different materials, route design, features and planting can improve and work with the environment. We will do this by running a series of design workshops over the course of three years in sites around the Southwest of England, that local communities are warmly invited to participate in alongside stakeholders and decision makers. The workshops will involve a broad cross section of woodland communities, including walkers, foresters, trees, conservation groups, cyclists, animals, horse-riders, landowners, fungi, and plants (what we call more-than-human forest communities). In these workshops we will imagine different possible futures for the UK's forests, and look for ways to make them more culturally rich, bio-diverse, and inclusive (to both humans and non-humans). We will work with several design methods during these sessions, including speculative and participatory design, sketching and prototyping, as well as working on the ground to build new trails and features with nature in mind. By the end of the project, we will have worked with several local communities and forestry experts to dream up, design, and prototype a series of trails and features, observed and evaluated how they get used, published our findings in various conferences, and reported our results back to the local communities through a series of inclusive exhibitions.

The UK's ambitions to achieve Net Zero by 2050 depend critically on large-scale greenhouse gas removal (GGR) that can offset emissions from difficult-to-decarbonise sectors. Capturing carbon in growing trees represents the only GGR technology that can be scaled up immediately and at relatively low cost to meet that requirement. As such, in the Environment Act (2021) the UK government committed to ambitious and legally-binding targets for the rapid expansion of UK woodland. Over the next few years, significant decisions must be made regarding where to plant half a million hectares of trees, decisions that will shape the UK countryside for generations to come. Deciding where to plant trees, which species to plant and when to plant them is complicated. How much GGR a particular woodland expansion strategy realises depends on a myriad of factors including how planting impacts on soil carbon stocks, how different tree species respond to spatially-varying environmental conditions under a changing climate and the vulnerability of planted trees to pests and disease. To complicate things further, in most cases new woodlands will be established on farmland. So planting comes at the cost of lost food production. That is important not only to landowners who are unlikely to consider planting trees unless compensated for lost farm income but also to policy makers who may have concerns over UK food security. Moreover, land use underpins a variety of important ecosystem services. Decisions over where to plant trees has significant implications for, amongst other things, flood mitigation, water quality, pollination, biodiversity and human health. The capacity to unravel that complexity and inform decision making, exists in the sophisticated science and socio-economic models developed by the academic community. Those models can simulate tree growth and GGR across the UK under climate change. They can estimate farm income changes from tree-planting and predict uptake of policy packages incentivising such land use change. They can even identify the impacts of tree planting on the flows of a whole array of ecosystems services. Unfortunately, these state-of-the-art models may take days to run and require expertise and specialist software that is simply not available to the diverse collection of policy makers and land managers engaged in tree-planting decisions. The central objective of this project is to bridge that gap, leveraging AI technologies to provide bespoke, AI-generated decision support tools that synthesise and present the information contained within state-of-the-art models in ways that can properly inform policy and planting decisions. Delivering this vision requires the embedding of existing AI technologies into the models themselves, allowing those models to be automatically scaled to the spatial and temporal resolution that best suits some particular decision problem. In addition, AI methods will be used to automatically build and link fast-running emulators of those scientific models. Powering decision-support tools with this AI-generated, fast-running modelling capacity will provide users with unprecedented capabilities to explore in real time tree-planting decisions and their numerous consequences. We will deliver co-designed tools to our project partners at Defra, National Trust, Forestry England, the Ministry of Defence, the National Forest Company, Network Rail and Woodland Trust. Moreover, our AI methods will ensure that this modelling technology is accessible to all landowners and policy makers engaged in tree-planting decisions. Configured through simple interfaces, the AI will assemble bespoke decision-support tools shaped and scaled to the exact decision needs of any user. Through this project the knowledge embedded in the science community's latest modelling and data will be transferred into the hands of the users that will shape the UK's Net Zero contribution from trees.