The BES Forest Ecology Special Interest Group‘s mission is to create an international community of forest ecologists. Secretary Alan Jones tells us more about the SIG and their plans for BES2018 below. 

The BES Forest Ecology Special Interest Group (FEG) has hosted a range of engaging events over the past few years, highlighting developing issues in forest ecology. Most recently, we supported a meeting at Wytham Woods, which was focussed on how to find continued support for long term experiments and environmental monitoring, such as has taken place at Wytham and other sites across the UK. Funding for this baseline environmental data gathering is in a parlous state and now the integrity of multi-decade datasets is under serious risk, acutely at a time when rapid global environmental changes are meaning such measurements are increasingly valuable.

The Wytham meeting was attended by a range of UK and international delegates from academia, government and NGO’s, and included a talk by George Peterken. The FEG intends to build on this success with a meeting in 2019, which will address issues relating to ash dieback in the UK, with a particular focus on consequences for forest carbon storage and sequestration. In previous years we have supported meetings around the UK, which have covered a range of topics including: wood meadows, continuous canopy cover forestry, tropical deforestation and ancient woodland indicators. We are always happy to receive meeting proposals from collaborators who want to work with us and have a proposal form for anyone submit ideas on our website.

During the BES Annual Meeting in Birmingham this December, we will be hosting FEG social on the Monday night. This will feature a ‘Tree Top Trumps’ game and some refreshments at a local establishment. Meet in the conference centre foyer on the evening of the 17^th December. See you there!

Alan Jones, Secretary of the Forest Ecology SIG

You can find the Forest Ecology SIG on their blog, twitter and facebook.