Woodland Trust

Woodland Trust

Formation	1972
Legal status	Non-profit company and registered charity
Purpose	Woodland in the UK
Location	Kempton Way, Grantham, Lincolnshire, England, NG31 6LL
Region served	UK
Membership	Woodland enthusiasts and conservationists
Chief Executive	Beccy Speight (as of 2014)
Main organ	Board of Trustees
Website	www.woodlandtrust.org.uk

The Woodland Trust is a conservation charity in the United Kingdom concerned with the protection and sympathetic management of native woodland heritage.

History

The charity was founded in Devon, England in 1972 by retired farmer and agricultural machinery dealer Kenneth Watkins.^[1] By 1977 it had twenty two woods in six counties. In 1978 it relocated to Grantham in Lincolnshire and announced an expansion of its activities across the UK. It has supported the National Tree Week scheme, which takes place in late November and is run by The Tree Council.

From 2005 to 2008 it co-operated with the BBC for their Springwatch programme and the BBC's Breathing Places^[2] series of events held at woods.

Nations

• It acquired Balmacaan Wood next to Loch Ness in 1984. It now has over 80 woods in Scotland, covering 21,000 acres (8,500 ha).
• In Wales, it acquired the 94 acres (38 ha) Coed Lletywalter in Snowdonia National Park in 1980. It now has over 100 woods in Wales.
• It started in Northern Ireland in 1996 when it received a grant from the Millennium Commission to set up over 50 community woods. The scheme was called Woods on Your Doorstep.

Headquarters

Its first employee and Director, John James, came from Lincolnshire and was living in Nottingham at the time. It had a small office on Westgate. John James was Chief Executive from 1992-97, and then Michael Townsend from 1997-2004.

A new eco-friendly headquarters, adjacent to the former HQ, was completed in 2010 at a cost of £5.1million.^[3] The new headquarters have been designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios as Architect and Atelier One as Structural Engineer,^[4] and incorporates light shelves to distribute natural daylight around the 200 workstations, and concrete panels to absorb daytime heat, to provide the thermal mass that the lightweight wooden structure would otherwise lack.^[5] It is estimated that compared to a concrete framed construction, the timber structure saved the equivalent in carbon production as nine years of the building's operation.^[3]

Structure

It is now based at Kempton Way on Dysart Road in Grantham in South Kesteven, south Lincolnshire, moving there in 2010. It employs around 300 people at its Grantham headquarters. Since 2005, the Chief Executive has been Cambridge-educated Sue Holden. Its current president is Clive Anderson since 2003.

Funding

The Woodland Trust receives funding from a wide range of sources including membership, legacies, donations and appeals, corporate supporters, grants and charitable trusts including lottery funding, other organisations and landfill tax.

Function

The Woodland Trust uses its experience and authority in conservation to influence others who are in a position to improve the future of native woodland. This includes government, other landowners and like-minded organisations. It also campaigns to protect and save ancient woodland from destructive development. Its projects also include the Nature Detectives youth programme, a project for schools learning about the seasonal effect on woodlands - phenology - and the Ancient Tree Hunt campaign.

It publishes books.

Woodland protection

It looks after more than 1,100 woods ^[6] and groups of woods covering 190 square kilometres (73 sq mi). Nearly 350 of its sites contain ancient woodland of which 70 per cent is semi-natural ancient woodland – land which has been under tree cover since at least 1600. It also manages over 110 Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

Woodland creation

It has also created new woodlands: over 32 km² (12 sq mi) have been created, including 250 new community woods in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its largest current projects include the 41.7 km² (16.1 sq mi) Glen Finglas Estate in the Trossachs, Scotland and the Heartwood Forest near St Albans, Hertfordshire, England, which will cover approximately 347 ha (860 acres). It owns 20 sites covering 4.3 km² (1.7 sq mi) in the National Forest and has twelve sites in Community Forests in England.

Millennium woods

The Woodland Trust's "Woods on your doorstep" project created 250 "Millennium woods" to celebrate the millennium 2000/2001.^[7]

Jubilee woods

Oxmoor Copse in Surrey

The Trust has launched a Jubilee Woods project, which aims to plant 6 million trees and create 60 commemorative 'Diamond' woods across the UK as part of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012.^[8] The largest of these, owned and managed by the Trust itself, is the Flagship Diamond Wood in Leicestershire. Situated within the National Forest this will be planted with 300,000 trees.^[9]

Ancient Tree Hunt

The Ancient Tree Hunt is a campaign by the Woodland Trust that seeks to catalogue all veteran trees in the United Kingdom. To date over 50,000 trees have been recorded; by 2011 it is projected to have grown to at least 100,000. It is hoped that it will allow a better understanding of the number and spread of ancient trees in the UK.^[10] It was started in 2004 by The Tree Register of the British Isles and the Ancient Tree Forum.^[10]

The trees catalogued by the project are recorded in a database maintained by the Woodland Trust. All entries (both verified and unverified) may be viewed on the campaign's website. All recorded trees may be viewed on an interactive map, or refined listings (of only verified trees) may be generated through a form generated search of the database.

Woods

Woodland near South Ockendon in Essex

Lineover Wood SSSI in Gloucestershire Cotswolds

Woods it owns and looks after include:

England

• Denge Wood - Kent
• Dick Buck's Burrows – Cromer, Norfolk^[11]
• Folke Wood - Dorset
• Great Wood, Felbrigg Estate – Norfolk^[12]
• Heartwood Forest - Hertfordshire
• Joyden's Wood - Kent
• Lineover Wood SSSI - Gloucestershire^[13]
• Oxmoor Copse - Surrey
• Pretty Corner Wood - Sheringham, Norfolk^[14]
• Skipton Woods - North Yorkshire
• Uffmoor Wood - Worcestershire
• Warren Wood – Norfolk^[15]
• Weybourne Wood – Weybourne Norfolk^[16]
• West Runton – West Runton, Norfolk^[17]
• Wychwood - Oxfordshire

Scotland

• Backmuir Wood, Angus
• Glen Finglas Estate - the Trossachs

See also

• Friends of the Earth
• Plantlife
• The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
• Forestry in the United Kingdom
• Forestry Commission
• The Big Tree Plant
• The Tree Council
• The Tree Register
• Trees of Britain and Ireland
• Hands off our Forest

References

External links

• The Woodland Trust website

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