Information note - No. 62 

The Forestry Research Co-ordination Committee met on 5 November 2003 at Defra, 1A Page Street, London.

Forestry Partnership for Action

A UK Forest Partnership for Action was announced at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and has taken a particular interest in forest restoration. UK forestry has been concerned with reafforestation since 1919 and since the 1970s has also learned a great deal about making restored forests provide an increased range of public benefits as well as timber. There is increasing public and corporate interest in such issues and partnerships of Government, industry and NGOs can create effective initiatives. The UK Partnership has held a seminar on sustainable timber procurement (London, 2003) and will consider sustainable construction, forest restoration and protection thereafter.

FRCC 2003 Workshops; Tree Genomics and Woodland Birds

The report of the FRCC workshops on Tree Genomics (April 2003) has been published and a paper on the Woodland Birds workshop was presented to the Committee by Dr Chris Quine at this meeting. The Committee expressed concern over the apparent decline in some woodland birds and acknowledged the need to understand the changes and their causes more clearly. The new RSPB/BTO survey ‘Long term changes in populations of woodland birds’ which is jointly funded by Defra, EN, FC, Woodland Trust, RSPB and BTO was welcomed. The Environmental Research Funders Forum is currently seeking to identify key UK databases and bird populations can be regarded as an important quality of life indicator.

FRCC welcomed the recommendations made in the report of the Woodland Birds Workshop and endorsed the need for further research to identify the causes of population declines and the landscape and habitat changes associated with them. The FRCC thanked Chris Quine, Richard Brand-Hardy, Keith Kirby, Phil Grice and Ken Smith for co-organisation of a very useful meeting. The workshop report will be published shortly along with the Committee’s response to it.

Members’ research programmes and the FRCC 2003/04 Collation of UK-funded forestry research

The Forestry Commission and Scottish Executive are both currently undertaking strategic reviews of their research programmes. Defra and DFID are undertaking significant reorganisation of research funding and the Defra research programme on farm woodlands is closing. Some projects with forestry components are now being funded under the EU’s 6^th Framework Programme and FP5 projects are coming to completion. These changes will influence UK expenditure on forestry research over the next few years.

Contributions to the 03/04 FRCC Collation of research projects will be requested in March 2004 and it is planned that the data and analysis of them will be available from November 2004. The call for contributions will clarify that the forestry components of projects with broad environmental, rural development and social objectives should be included. The main geographical relevance of projects will be detailed and additional guidance on keywords will be provided.

The next meeting of FRCC will be on 22 April 2004 in Edinburgh.