Developing Climate-Resilient Woodlands in the UK: Insights from Gair Wood
The concurrent climate and biodiversity crises have driven global, national and regional targets to restore landscapes and create woodlands. In England, Defra’s Environmental Improvement Plan commits to increasing tree and woodland cover from 14.5% to 16.5% by 2050 (Defra, 2023), whilst the Climate Change Committee recommend creating at least 37,000 hectares of new woodland per year until 2050 (1 hectare is approximately the size of an international rugby pitch; Climate Change Committee, 2025).
New woodlands are being established in different ways, from direct planting of tree species deemed suitable for conditions at a particular site, through to approaches that allow trees to regenerate naturally. Where trees are directly planted, diverse species mixtures are increasingly being used to maximise resilience of the overall woodland to pests, diseases and climate change. It is unclear how these different approaches affect the initial survival and growth of the trees (Grossman et al., 2018), the greenhouse gas balance of the trees and their surrounding soil (Snabel et al., 2025a), the microclimate they create (Snabel et al., 2025b), or how the microbial community in the soil changes as the trees establish (see e.g., Iqbal et al., 2025).
In 2023, the University of Leeds planted over 60,000 native trees at Gair Wood in north Leeds. As well as planted trees, Gair Wood includes almost 2 hectares of land in which no trees were planted, but the area is protected from grazing animals to facilitate natural regeneration. Around 6,000 of the trees have been planted in a diversity experiment that features mixtures of 1, 4, 8 or 12 different species planted in 10 metre x 10 metre plots (find out more about tree diversity experiments in e.g., Paquette et al., 2018).
Using Gair Wood as a living laboratory, this project aims to address several research questions:
– How does woodland creation method (i.e., planting or natural regeneration) affect initial tree survival and growth rates, soil carbon fluxes and diversity within the rhizosphere (both of bacteria and fungi)?
– How does diversity in surrounding tree species affect the success of initial tree establishment, vulnerability to browsing, the microclimate created, and the development of mycorrhizal networks?
We will address these questions through detailed measurements of the newly planted and regenerating trees, seasonal monitoring of greenhouse gas fluxes, assessment of soil microbial and fungal DNA, and in-situ climatic measurements.
Skills, Training & Research Group:
You will have a background in a physical or biological science (including environmental science, ecology, mathematics, physical geography, or natural sciences). You will join the Biosphere – Atmosphere Group (BAG) within the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science and the Ecology and Evolution group in the School of Biology. You will become a member of the cross-faculty Leeds Ecosystem, Atmosphere and Forest (LEAF) Centre giving you the opportunity to exchange knowledge with colleagues from across the University of Leeds. You will benefit from the training in both specific technical and in transferable skills provided by the YES-DTN and those offered by the University of Leeds.
References and Further Reading:
Climate Change Committee, ‘The Seventh Carbon Budget’, available here: https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/the-seventh-carbon-budget/ (2025).
Defra, ‘Environmental Improvement Plan’, available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/environmental-improvement-plan (2023).
Grossman, J., et al., ‘Synthesis and future research directions linking tree diversity to growth, survival, and damage in a global network of tree diversity experiments’, Environmental and Experimental Botany, 152 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envexpbot.2017.12.015
Iqbal, S., et al., ‘The invisible architects: microbial communities and their transformative role in soil health and global climate changes’, Environmental Microbiome, 20, 36 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40793-025-00694-6
Paquette, A., et al., ‘A million and more trees for science’. Nat Ecol Evol., 2, 763–766 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0544-0
Schnabel, F., et al., ‘Tree Diversity Increases Carbon Stocks and Fluxes Above—But Not Belowground in a Tropical Forest Experiment’, Glob Change Biol, 31: e70089, (2025a). https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70089
Schnabel, F., et al., ‘Tree Diversity Increases Forest Temperature Buffering via Enhancing Canopy Density and Structural Diversity’, Ecology Letters, 28: e70096, (2025b). https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70096