The UBoC Womble at Upper Bargh Wood above Settle yesterday was a great if exhausting success.

UBoC PhD student Charlotte Weaver has been awarded ‘Best Best Brainstorming Presentation” for her work on the impact of large-scale bioenergy expansion on land use change and biodiversity.

“From 18^th – 21^st October 2019, I attended the International Conference on Alternative Fuels, Energy and Environment (ICAFEE series) which was held at Feng Chia University (FCU), Taichung, Taiwan. I was thrilled to find out that I had won an award for my oral presentation in which I described my work looking at the global impacts of 2^nd generation bioenergy expansion on biodiversity loss over the 21^st century.

Emissions of smoke from peatland fires may have been underestimated, according to UBoC PhD student Laura Kiely and others:

In the last few weeks thousands of peatland and forest fires have been burning across Sumatra and Kalimantan, two islands in Indonesia. Smoke from these fires causes haze across Singapore and Malaysia as well as areas of Indonesia, causing unhealthy levels of air pollution. Schools have been closed and residents are being advised to stay indoors.

It’s been nearly three summers since we first ventured out, our pockets bulging with books about trees, the scent of sap and science in our nostrils, and tape measures, maps, rainproof clipboards, and funny bits of plastic with a wobbly circle-thing on them all festooned about our persons – to begin the University of Leeds Campus i-Tree Eco Full Survey.

We have news of two kinds of Yum Yum Tree at UBoC this week.

The first is the (semi) fictitious kind – as described in typically charming and educational detail by the pen and brush of our Chair, Jonnie Wild, and his illustrator, Brita Granström, in their new book for small children. This is the third, along with The Carnivorous Crocodile and the Mud Monster to feature the Five Flamingos.

And, again, all profits are going to support our Reforest Africa project.

Two members of the UBoC team have appeared on the BBC recently.

Kate Sambrook appeared on Paul Hudson’s Weather Show on the 8th of July, talking about her upcoming PhD.

She tweeted: “Thrilled to be back in the studio with @Hudsonweather on the @weathershowbbc talking about my PhD project and my podcast with @TheClimatePress on the history of climate change”

The Committee for Climate Change (of which our Trustee Piers Forster in a member) has advised that we need to halve emissions by 2030 if we’re to stand a fair chance of avoiding more than 1.5 degrees C of warming over pre-industrial levels, and possibly catastrophic climate impacts.

Restoring Hardknott Forest is a partnership between the University of Leeds and Forestry England which is restoring a 630 hectare former conifer plantation to a native oak and birch woodland.

UBoC’s Professor Dominick Spracklen and PhD researcher Felicity Monger were interviewed by Nick Garnett last week at the Leeds Forest Observatory on Radio 5 Live Breakfast, as part of UN International Day of Forests. 

You can listen to the interview here, first at about 55:20 and again at 1:56:30):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0003bbp

BBC Radio 5 Live have been doing excellent work on climate change and other global environmental issues such as plastic pollution, under their Cool Planet banner:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06zlygh

Dom and Felicity explained the research work being done at the observatory, the value of trees and their role in helping to mitigate climate change (clue; we can’t plant enough to fix the problem, but it certainly helps), and in helping to prevent flooding. Later they suggested ways in which people can get involved in supporting tree planting.