Samuel Aizlewood

PhD Project: How and where should we expand UK woodlands to benefit people and biodiversity?

We are living through a period of profound environmental change. Against this backdrop, and in pursuit of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the UK government has pledged to increase woodland cover from ~13% to ~19%. This could have important implications for the conservation of UK woodland species, 53% of which are currently declining, as well as people’s access to green spaces. More widely, the government has pledged to protect 30% of the UK’s land by 2030 to support the recovery of nature. As much of the land left available in the UK is privately owned, there is a need to engage with landowners to determine how these biodiversity conservation targets can be met.

To that end, Sam's PhD, in partnership with the Woodland Trust, will develop a conservation plan within the Woodland Trust’s Weald and Downs treescape for Kent, West Sussex, East Sussex, Hampshire and Surrey, using a systematic conservation planning approach. Systematic conservation planning is a widely used decision support tool that enables cost-effective decisions to be made about the prioritisation of sites for conservation in a way that is transparent, defensible and flexible. However, whilst in recent years increased prominence has been given to the social context within which conservation decision-making sits, social science methods need to be better integrated into the systematic conservation planning process.

Sam's PhD project will use novel methods to quantify social factors spatially, such as landowners’ willingness to set aside land for conservation. These findings will then be used alongside existing biodiversity data within spatial prioritisation software. The project will also seek to improve the inclusion of social data and consideration of social factors throughout systematic conservation planning approaches to make them more informative for on-the-ground decision making.

Conservation Biology; Conservation Planning; Conservation Social Science

Supervisors

• Professor Zoe Davies
• Professor Robert Fish
• Professor Bob Smith
• Dr Martin Dallimer (University of Leeds)
• Dr Hazel Jackson (Woodland Trust) 

• NERC Aries-SeNSS DTP Case partnership with the Woodland Trust