Northern Research Station Seminar Series 2007/8

 

Impacts of climate change on forests and forestry in Scotland

9th November 2007 by Duncan Ray (Forest Research)

This seminar provided an assessment and discussion of the impact of UKCIP02 climate change predictions on UK forestry, including:

• Species choice and site interactions, timber quality, longevity, pests and diseases interactions
• Stand management options and windows, e.g. ATC, wind-risk, thinning, site access for machinery, soil compaction damage
• Native woodlands, e.g. species composition changes, pressure for species movement, colonisation, fragmentation, biodiversity.

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Geological information and technology in support of soil science, a view from the British Geological Surveys Soils Programme

30th November 2007 by Prof. Barry Smith (BGS)

This seminar discussed provision of improved soils information to UK soil scientists, and identified the potential for integration of soil function into a systems approach to understanding landscape processes.

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Climate change and ecosystems services – a complex systems approach

7th December 2007 by Prof. Terry Dawson (Univ. of Southampton)

Rural livelihoods in Madagascar depend heavily on forest resources, which are under pressure from climate change and deforestation. This presentation looked at an integrated framework for analysing these dynamic and highly-variable ecosystems to enable us to improve upon adaptation strategies to increase resilience in these complex social-ecological systems.

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Payments for Ecosystem Services: perspectives from the United States

18th January 2008 by Dr Gregory Valatin (Forest Research) and Jenna Coull (Forestry Commission)

Mitigation Banking, Water Quality Trading, Carbon markets including forestry offsets, and schemes to tackle tropical deforestation were discussed.

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Forests, trees, human health and well-being

8th February 2008 by Dr Richard Mitchell (University of Edinburgh)

There is a great deal of interest in whether green environments might be a route to tackling poor health in the UK. This seminar presented both published and new work by Dr Richard Mitchell on the health impacts of green spaces at a population level. Using data from Scotland, England and a new EU-wide study, Dr Mitchell showed evidence that green space appears to be good for some of us, but not all of us, and set out priorities for future research and action in this field.

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Woods full of old stuff – the role of Forest Research in preserving the historic environment

22nd February 2008 by Peter Crow (Forest Research)

An overview of Foresr Researcg’s past and current research into protection of the historic environment within woodlands.

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LIDAR Remote Sensing for the estimation of biophysical canopy properties

29th February 2008 by Dr Felix Morsdorf School Of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is an active remote sensing methodology capable of directly measuring the location of reflecting points on the earth’s surface. The presentation focused on the derivation of structural aspects of the vegetation canopy from ALS data in its raw form and attempts to develop, implement and validate robust methods for biophysical vegetation parameter estimation.

An approach for the estimation of the canopy geometry at the scale of single trees from ALS data was implemented and validated using field data. It was shown that the tree geometry, including position, tree height and crown diameter, of single trees could be derived from the laser point cloud with an accuracy that matches the one of traditional field work. A methodology for the derivation of canopy density measures such as leaf area index (LAI) and fractional cover (fCover) was discussed and the importance of flying altitude

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Species and habitat conservation for plants – projects and perspectives at Plantlife Scotland

7th March 2008 by Deborah Long (Plantlife Scotland)

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