Turnips share their moist alluvial bed with leeks and chards, courgettes stroke the cheeks of plump pumpkins and yellow ears of corn reach for the cloud-scuffed Normandy skies beneath fruit trees heaving with apples and plums. In the middle of this picture of Eden, a 63-year old man is in charge of a piece of equipment that’s more like a giant hair comb than an agricultural tool. Gingerly he pushes the device forward, carving neat cultivation channels into an unplanted vegetable bed. “Worms, woodlice, beetles, microorganisms. The whole diversity of nature remains undisturbed,” Charles Hervé-Gruyer, a sailor turned permaculture pioneer, explains of his willfully rudimentary farming technique.

With tools that owe more to ancient peoples than modern Western agriculture, the Bec Hellouin farm in Normandy, northwestern France, offers a vision of what nature-inspired food production could be: not a mass-scale high-technology pursuit but instead a practice that draws on the manual, handed-down techniques of centuries of farmers from rural India to 19th century France.

“With tractor-cultivated land soil is exposed and requires external inputs in terms of fertiliser,” Charles explains. “With our dense planting and biomass method the farm self-fertilises, as it stores carbon and protects biodiversity.”

Only four souls farm Bec Hellouin’s 20 hectares: Charles, his wife Perrine, 46, a former lawyer, and two hired gardeners, yet their yields are so impressive they are the subject of a series of studies, including by the French National Institute of Agricultural Research.

Key to the Hervé-Gruyer method is dense and complementary planting: rapid-growing radishes provide shade for neighbouring carrots, which need a cool climate to thrive. In the space left by harvested radishes and carrots, winter cabbage is planted. Densely planted beds, interspersed with ponds and patches of woodland, also mean that nutrients and water are retained, with little opportunity for weeds to take hold. Ground-level clover, sorrel and mint, Charles adds, fix nitrogen and mulch and rotting plants nourish the beds in unplanted spots. The couple only use manual tools and boast they never have to water their farm, even in the climate-change induced summer heatwaves of 2019 and 2020.

This verdant picture is in marked contrast to the inhospitable tract of land the couple bought, on a utopian whim, in 2006.

“It took us two years to clear the slopes,” Charles recalls of the land that, with its meagre layer of humus, was only suitable for pasture. “It seemed like heresy to plant anything here.” It was the discovery of permaculture, an Australian philosophy that sees nature as an intelligent toolbox to mimic rather than master, and reading up on the farming methods of old Parisian market gardeners and Amazonian forest farmers that transformed the couples’, and Bec Hellouin’s fate.

“We’d started from a point where the earth was very poor, just grass, and nature responded very quickly,” Perrine says of the farm’s remarkable productivity. A 2018 study found that, by reusing using biomass from their own farm, the Hervé-Gruyers have produced the most fertile soil in their region, known for its poorly drained, calcareous soils: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2018.00116/full

Despite their successes, Perrine admits that they have faced some resistance to their methods from the French naysayers they call the ‘little grandpas’, who sometimes characterise them as bohemians, or cranks. And their model, they admit, is not suitable for all contexts due to the level of expertise and trial and error that it requires. But for the couple, who now tutor would-be organic farmers from across the world at the Bec Hellouin institute, it’s not if their method should be replicated across the West, but when.

“By using the wisdom of generations of farmers informed by the latest science, we can create a world of small farms that are carbon sinks, oases of biodiversity, a place to regenerate soil and to create abundance for local communities,” Charles says, adding: “As a friend of mine says, utopia is like spinach in the pan: it reduces so quickly we have to keep adding more.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: the Hervé-Gruyers and Luke Duggleby, the Climate Heroes Project

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In the 16th century, when the Portuguese sailed to the Arabian shores, they were enamoured by the plentiful, fresh seafood available along Oman’s 3,000 km coastline. Today, the sultanate of Oman is looking to revive this historic industry to reduce its dependence on the declining oil sector. “Fish farming has an untapped potential due to Oman’s geographical location. Agriculture and Fisheries is the second largest industry, therefore, it is natural that the government considered investing in it to decrease the reliance on oil and gas”, says Rumaitha Al Busaidi, an Omani environmentalist. The idea is sound, but its implementation has so far been marred by the lack of advanced technological implementations in Omani fisheries. Farmers still rely on the indigenous Falaj irrigation system, developed in 500 AD and used till date, which carries water from the natural springs to the mountain villages for farming and aquaculture. While it might have worked in the past, today this is problematic.

“Our fish production quality suffers because the water used for fish production and farming gets mixed with the saline water from the ocean, dramatically decreasing our income”, complains Khalifa Al Sahabi, a fish farmer in Bidiyah town in the Sharqiyah region.

To address this issue, Al Busaidi has introduced the concept of integrated Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) in aquaculture farms. These use mechanical and biological filters to reuse the water in production and minimise water resources for organic aquatic farming. “RAS technology also protects the marine environment”, she explains, “by restricting the effluent that reaches the ocean.” The Oman government had implemented this technology initially for the production of Tiger prawns. Food lovers and industry experts laud their size and quality. RAS technology has helped in increasing the production rate of these prawns even as it has made intensive fish production compatible with environmental sustainability. In May 2021, Oman invested in the construction of a 8,000 hectare aquaculture farm: the second largest in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.

A number of barriers had to be overcome for the RAS technology to be implemented. Costs of installing temperature controls in the desert kingdom are high and it has been tricky to persuade local farmers to choose this newer technology over their traditional aquaculture methods. It has taken extensive educational drives by the Omani government to finally develop 21 integrated tilapia farms, one shrimp farm, and one marine cage farm in the country. Today, the figures speak for themselves. The production of tilapia has leapt from three tonnes in 2013 and five in 2014 to 20 tonnes in 2015 and 77 tonnes in 2017.

“With the help of RAS, we have successfully enhanced the fish quality by 66 percent across the country in the last six years”, says Nasser Abdullah, Assistant Project Manager of the Al-Wusta fish farming project. Next on the cards: using RAS technology for salmon production. While energy intensive, this sustainable aquaculture model is ensuring safer fishing techniques and lowered food miles for fish consumers across the Middle East.

Author: Rahma Khan, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Oman banner image – Richard Bartz/ Wikimedia Commons, Muscat fish markets – StellarD and Khalifa Al Sahabi
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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The tiny ice crystals on the dark green leaves sparkle in the winter sun. Wolfgang Palme breaks one leaf off the palm cabbage to eat. “It tastes nutty, elegant and sweet”, he says, smiling. An icy wind blows over the fields. Wolfgang Palme pulls up the zip of his weather jacket. The agronomist and head of the Austrian Research Institute of Horticulture has come to enjoy the taste of winter. The cold does not seem to harm the vegetables in his field. Chard, spinach, purslane, radish, turnips, leek, herbs and many species of cabbage are surviving undamaged despite temperatures falling far below zero on the day we meet. Nearby, in unheated soft-plastic tunnels, salads, carrots, celery or pea sprouts are thriving. Wolfgang Palme and his team planted them in late summer last year. Now it is the end of winter. There is still snow on the mountains around the Zinsenhof, an experimental farm between Linz and Vienna. But the vegetables are ready to eat.

It is a boon for his community, where in winter, fresh vegetable consumption entails buying produce grown in faraway, warmer climates. In fact, this is how most of Central Europe sources vegetables in winter. These, however, come with hidden costs. According to WWF Switzerland, a kilogram of asparagus flown in from Peru results in 15 kilograms of carbon emissions, compared to less than one kilogram had it been locally cultivated in the field. Green beans arriving from Morocco emit more than 30 times carbon than those that are locally grown. And what is available in winter locally is typically grown in heated greenhouses. “On a cold winter night, a heated greenhouse of 1.5 acres emits as much carbon as a detached house in a whole year,” says Palme, adding, “mankind can no longer afford this”. His innovative farming techniques balance the need to save the environment with meeting the consumer demand for fresh produce.

Palme has identified and published nearly 80 varieties of veggies which stand the Austrian frost. The idea of growing them in sub-zero temperatures came to him by chance. In an experiment, Asian salad greens were surprised by frost. But in spite of minus 11 degrees they remained undamaged. The technical literature had stated that they could withstand frost of only minus three to five degrees. “Fortunately, the lettuce had not read the literature,” he quips. This experience made him realise that often the growing conditions listed on seed packets, especially about how much frost they can bear, is not wholly accurate. So he redefined it.

With his work, the scientist wants to provide practical knowledge to other farmers. He is presently working with seven vegetable farms all over Austria. “Winter vegetables are good for small and medium-sized farmers,” says Palme. “They can be grown on land and soft-plastic tunnels all year round and save energy. Even in winter, they can offer fresh produce from their own cultivation.” The all-important question is how these vegetables manage to survive the frost. Palme plucks a lettuce leaf and takes a nibble. “Many vegetables form a kind of frost protection in their cells, which is made of sugar.. ” he says, through happy chews. “This is the reason they taste so good…”

Author: Klaus Sieg, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Wolfgang Palme

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The Covid-19 pandemic showed many global city dwellers a future in which we might all breathe more freely. Across the world, as populations were subject to stay-at-home orders and road transport activity dipped, city-dwellers enjoyed clear skies; and a respite from road traffic produced pollutants such as nitrogen dioxides, carbon monoxides and the dangerous vehicle particulates PM 2.5s: tiny specks of pollution which, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.

Those traffic-borne emissions prompted the World health Organisation, in 2019, to characterise air pollution as the number one environmental health risk globally, the cause of an estimated 7.1 million premature deaths per year.

One solution to cities’ pollution problem is air purifiers and, as populations demand clearer air yet policies to reduce car-borne pollution lag behind, air purifiers are big business. Indeed market size is expected to reach USD 22.80 billion by 2028 and is expected to expand ten percent a year from 2021 to 2028.

The problem with standard electric air purifiers however is similar to air conditioners, in that they can compound the problem in themselves requiring power to run, which, in most global contexts, produces additional carbon pollution. Trees, of course, are excellent natural air purifiers but demands for land in cities make it difficult to plant the number of trees necessary to drastically improve air quality.

One answer to this problem also comes from nature, in one young German horticulturist’s design for an air filter that’s based on air-cleansing abilities of common-or-garden moss.

Green City Solutions was founded in 2014 by 29-year-old Peter Sänger, who brought together a team of experts in fields ranging from horticulture to mechanical engineering to design a novel bio-tech filter, the City Tree. “I felt the solution to air pollution can only emerge in combination with nature,” he says, of concentrating his research efforts on moss. “After all, nature has millions of years of experience in air purification.”

Moss is well adapted to the task of filtering polluted air, possessing the ability to bind fine dust and metabolise it. It can filter soot and particulates from the air breathed by 7,000 people every hour. In addition, mosses cool surrounding air by evaporating water on their leaf surface. The problem is that mosses can barely survive in cities due to their need for water and shade. So Green City Solutions solved this problem by connecting a range of species of mosses (with different filtering abilities) to low-energy water and nutrient provision based on unique Internet of Things technology, which measures the plants’ requirements and surrounding pollution levels in real time.

Independent field studies have shown that up to 82 percent of the fine dust in city air can be filtered directly by the City Trees, which the company has installed in cities across Germany, and in London and Paris. Each moss tower has the carbon dioxide absorbing capability of 275 trees.

Positioning is key; as Sänger notes: “Not all places where people live are polluted, and people aren’t everywhere there is pollution. Where the two meet, that’s where we place the trees.” Sänger would like to see his devices installed in the world’s most vehicle-polluted cities within the next decade.

The company is now developing moss-based air filters that are also suitable for consumers to use in their homes or that function – in an extra boon – as attractive greenery for vertical facades.

Author: James Gavin, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Green City Solutions; Peter Sänger and Peter Puhlmann for Green City Solutions; Nate Bell

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The future of global infrastructure is to be found on a humble stretch of motorway in the province of Zeeland, in the Netherlands. In 2010 the Dutch government donated a 400-metre strip of the A58 to Erik Schlangen and his team at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at the University of Delft, to test the radical idea of creating a road surface capable of healing itself.

The porous mixture of bitumen and aggregate stones used on road surfaces across the globe is a dream to drive on, but costly to maintain. Over several years UV light exposure and tyre pressure cause the binding bitumen to shrink, loosening the aggregate and leading to everything from potholes to damaged windscreens and road accidents. Schlangen realised that by incorporating into a novel asphalt tiny fibres of the steel wool that’s commonly used to scrub domestic saucepans and applying occasional induction heat from a modified vehicle, he could initiate a form of self-repair.

“When you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks and the stones are again fixed to the asphalt,” said Schlangen, demonstrating his self-healing asphalt with a sledgehammer and microwave, in a TED Talk that’s been viewed over a million times.

Repairing the material world that supports our modern lives is costly, both financially and it comes to carbon emissions. In 2009, EU governments invested €4.5 billion into the development and maintenance of EU road networks and corrosion of industrial and transport infrastructure is estimated to cost the global economy US $2.5 trillion a year. The arrival of animate materials promises to radically reduce these expenses as it revolutionises the way we understand our built world.

“Animate materials are more like nature,” says Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London in the UK and author of a 2020 Royal Society report into the potential of animate materials. “Nature makes materials, but these materials look after themselves, they harvest energy from the sun and can heal themselves. That is where the materials of the future will be.”

The revolution has already arrived in the lab, where design breakthroughs in recent years include a a coating for concrete that contains microcapsules that seal cracks when activated by sunlight, developed by researchers in South Korea; ‘living bricks’, made by mixing gelatin, calcite and sand with Synechococcus bacteria, which regenerate in response to temperature and humidity changes, from a team at the University of Boulder in Colorado; and a self-healing coating that can patch up imperfections on metal in matter of seconds from Northwestern University, an advance on the ‘self-healing’ polymers that are already used by Nissan to heal scratches on car bodywork.

One downside to the coming revolution in living materials, Miodownik points out, is that it disrupts established economies of ‘build and repair’. “Potholes drive economic growth,” Miodownik explains, “as companies have contracts to build roads and also repair the potholes in these roads.” The revolution, he adds, will require radical new business models.

Ten years on, studies on the samples from the A58 suggest that the life asphalt road can be doubled to 15 years if induction heat is applied every four years. Erik Schlangen’s road, he is happy to report, remains pothole-free. “Imagine buildings, roads, bridges, walls and perhaps entire cities that have qualities like these, composed of building blocks that can mimic some of the characteristics of cells and that operate autonomously together to promote growth, adaptation and healing,” the Royal Society Report concludes; daring us to dream.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Marc Oliver Jodoin, Ian Taylor, Andy Kuo (Unsplash)

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How do you track something as shifting and ephemeral as global bird migrations? Use the might of the great British twitcher [bird watcher], that’s how.

BirdTrack is an online citizen science website, operated by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) in partnership with the RSPB, BirdWatch Ireland, the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club and the Welsh Ornithological Society that allows birdwatchers to record the names and numbers of birds seen in a specified location anywhere in the world.

BirdTrack’s community of 34,000 active users has, to date, uploaded 1.1 billion entries of data, logging everything from species location and behaviour to birdsong and mating behaviours, says the BTO’s Scott Mayson.

“We get simple entries that say ‘I saw X bird at X location’; but then we will get really precise references such as that a male was singing to a female a specific ordnance survey grid reference and it was a mating song. In our world, though, all records are useful.”

The data – which feeds into similar data inputs from the European Commission-funded Eurobird portal – allows the real-time mapping of bird migrations across the European continent and, crucially, charts how these avian flows are changing year-on-year.

“We find that some birds, such as the willow warbler, are migrating further northwards,” Mayson explains, “and that species such as the chiffchaff and blackcap which used to winter on the continent are now wintering here.”

BirdTrack’s vast data pool, Mayson adds, acts as an early warning system that species might be under threat, whether that’s as a result of global heating, pollution or of habitat destruction. “We now know that bitterns, a kind of small heron, are dwindling as their reed-bed habitats [thickly vegetated and waterlogged zones between water and land] have been drained; so there are efforts to restore these habitats that have come directly from this data.”

It’s thanks, too, to BirdTrack data that the RSPB is running mass surveys of species that appear to be under threat, including the lesser-spotted woodpecker and fabled turtle dove.

Andrew Sims, 74 and based in Lincolnshire, has been a twitcher since the 1970s and an enthusiastic BirdTracker for the past eight years. Sims enjoys a daily birding walk along the same looped route from his home and religiously submits his sightings into BirdTrack’s app as he strolls. “By submitting at the same spots every day through the years I know I’m doing my bit to help record population trends,” he says. “It feels like a service as well as a pleasure.”

Little egrets, rare when he began twitching, are now a common sight, Sims says, as his much-loved woodpeckers have slowly disappeared from his patch. He hopes that data such as his will make an argument for government interventions in climate change. “I love that BirdTrack gives you a personal record of your sightings over time as well as the bigger picture,” he adds.

An obvious risk with mass citizen science projects is spotter error: what if an unschooled birder identifies a chaffinch for a sparrow; say? BirdTrack, says Mayson, flags up an entry if a user chooses a species that is unexpected in an area at a given time of year, to make such mis-identifications less likely.

BirdTrack has seen its usership increase 23 percent since the pandemic as we feel a renewed appreciation for outdoor environments, and their feathered residents. BirdTrack has also realised, in this strange time, the potential of its data to protect both avian and human populations from disease. “We can look at the movements of reservoir species such as geese, for example, to predict where the next outbreaks of bird flu might happen,” Mayson adds.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and Eurobird

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Those familiar with the 2013 Oscar-winning film Gravity have some idea of how desperate a space debris crisis can be. It’s known as Kessler syndrome, the hypothetical event by which Earth’s orbital space becomes so crowded with junk that orbital impacts are inevitable. Such an event would mean nothing less than the end of space exploration and satellite coverage on Earth for thousands of years.

Debris can be formed of anything from whole derelict craft to millimetre-wide chips of paint. No matter its size, this waste orbits the Earth at hundreds of miles an hour. In 2020 alone, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Aeolus craft had to dodge a Starlink satellite after SpaceX declined to adjust its trajectory.

It’s no wonder policymakers are being pressured to impose tougher restrictions on space businesses to ensure de-orbit procedures (policies of bringing space technology back to Earth) and measures to rein in violations. Thankfully, innovative companies are also coming up with measures to mitigate the issue.

Founded in early 2018 and originally a Swiss state project, ClearSpace SA has developed Clearspace-1, a demonstration satellite which captures and de-orbits dead satellites using four spider-like robotic arms, which close like claws over derelict space technology. They plan to launch in 2025 with the help of the European Space Agency.

Astroscale, a Japanese company with branches in the UK and US, has a similar mission, though with a much smaller craft. Astroscale’s Jason Forshaw, Head of Future Business Europe explains: “the two-part mechanism is made up of the docking plate and the robotics which extend and engage a magnet to dock onto the associated plate and allow separation from it. After docking, the craft and its target can de-orbit, burning down into particulate in the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Astroscale’s demonstration, ELSA-d, is launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in March 2021, on an Arianespace Soyuz, a Russian rocket. Smaller, smaller and therefore cheaper, de-orbiters like theirs could corner the market for orbital sustainability, if effective.

Though debris mitigation is smart, it requires advanced technology and a launch capability that’s not currently widely available. With sizable price tags and no regulation in the offing, cynics doubt space businesses will be willing to pay the bill to clean up after themselves.

With academics suggesting that nets, harpoons or even high-powered lasers could also offer results, the field of debris removal remains a lively concern in space science. It only remains for earthlings to take their conservation impetus to the final frontier.

Author: Laurence Russell, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: banner image of ClearSpace-1 – ClearSpaceSA, images 1,2,3 – ESA, images 4,5 – Astroscale

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Clean water is a fundamental human need, with polluted water leading to a host of diseases from cholera, to dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid, and polio. 

Happily, global access to improved water has increased in recent decades, thanks to governmental and charitable funding, rising from 76 percent of the global population in 1990 to 91 percent in 2015, with even remote communities supplied with the manual hand pumps known as the Afrodev and India Mark 2, which are simple to install and draw clean water from boreholes drilled deep into the ground. But there’s a problem. With visits to rural locations being costly, water pump maintenance typically occurs only once or twice a year. This means that broken or degraded water pumps can stay broken for months, leaving communities with little option to return to dirty water sources.

A novel solution to this decades-old issue makes the most of a concert of recent technological breakthroughs: affordable cloud computing, the roll out of mobile telecommunications to the world’s remotest spots and the Internet of Things (IoT).

“We saw the technology was there to make cheap water point sensors a possibility, but we knew that there was a gap between big tech – who had the skills but no economic incentive to solve the problem – and charities that had the incentive but lacked the requisite tech skills” says Christoph Gorder of charity: water, the nonprofit behind the innovation. 

Charity: water developed two IoT sensor designs, the Afrodev and India Mark 2 sensors, with Michigan engineering firm Twisthink. They use the capacitive sensors commonly employed in smartphones to sense the position of a user’s finger on a touch screen which, in the water point sensors, measure the difference in electrical conductivity between the presence of water, and the presence of air, to sense the activity and efficiency of the water pumps. Microchips store the data and transmit it, via IoT carrier deals with local mobile phone companies, to charity: water’s New York head office, but also local charity and government partners such as NEWAH in Nepal, who use the data to coach locals to repair water sources in the field. The data can also be used to contract local companies to maintain sensors, with a clear picture of the work involved and its timings. It was important to Gorder and his team that the devices had a long battery life, as additional maintenance of sensors “would raise more issues that it resolved”.

Now installed at over 7,000 pumps in Ethiopia, Nepal, Ghana, Malawi and Uganda, the charity is currently producing its fourth generation sensor, which has an additional sensor to monitor pump handle strokes. Charity: water has made its sensor design open source, and is keen to help grassroots charities and governments across the world to roll out the technology anywhere it would be of benefit, although its application will be limited by local telecommunications reach.

Gorder says unexpected insights have come from the sensors’ data. Two months ago, the charity were field testing their fourth-generation pump in Uganda’s Apac district when they received data that the sensor was recording water flow 23 hours out of 24 (in other locations pumps tend to lie fallow from around 11pm to sunrise).

After much head-scratching and fears the device had a bug, it turned out that local brickmakers were making the most of a full moon to pump the many litres of water they need for their trade, with no one else about. “It was an aha moment,” says Gorder, “and it makes us wonder how much we don’t yet know about global water-pump use.”

Gorder hopes that insights such as these will bring the gift of reliable clean water to the three billion people across the world who rely on simple pumps for their water supply; a project that’s never been more pressing, as Covid shows the importance of sanitation to stave off disease.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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How do you protect a padauk tree in Gabon, central Africa, from illegal logging? Bore a sharp metal tube into its dark red trunk. In a pioneering new conservation project, specially trained samplers drive the gadget called a Pickering Punch into a living padauk tree at waist height. The precious sample they extract then makes a long journey to scientists at Kew Gardens in south-west London for analysis.

Along with organisations including the Forest Stewardship Council in the US, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is part of WorldForestID, an international effort to stop the fraudulent timber trade. This is the wood that ends up as furniture, flooring and paper, but whose identity and provenance is little understood with existing databases of geo-referenced wood samples being limited and documentation poor.

According to the European Union, between 20 percent and 40 percent of the global timber trade comes from illegal sources, and costs the governments of developing countries between €10-€15bn [US$12bn to $18bn] a year in lost revenues, while decimating native forests, reducing habitat for wildlife and depressing world timber prices. Rosewood alone comprises 35 percent of the monetary value of confiscated illegal wildlife trade, according to WorldForestID.

WorldForestID is trying to tackle this by answering two questions, says Dr Peter Gasson, wood anatomist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: What is the identity of the wood and where was it grown? “First of all, we need adequate reference wood samples from which to derive data, and then we can address these two questions,” he says.

The project is complicated by the fact that trees are harvested in one place, transported through one or more countries, and only then processed into manufactured products: oak furniture and flooring imported into the USA and Europe, for example, often comprising several species of white oak from North America and the Russian Far East.

Back in Gabon, the Pickering Punch has worked its magic and the sample is dried and packed off to Kew’s Plant Quarantine Unit, where it’s inspected for contamination. It’s then frozen at -40 degrees centigrade for 72 hours to kill any invertebrates with the sample’s origin. Then the process of identity verification begins.

It’s relatively easy for an expert to identify the genus by eye or hand lens, or using a microscope. But like the forests they’re trying to protect, the population of expert anatomists is in decline. Automated machine learning is being developed by the team to meet this human shortfall. Routes to identification include chemical analysis, DNA sequencing, and stable isotope ratio analysis, which can shed light on the environment the tree has grown in, as well as its age.

To counter the risk of samples being given fraudulent geo-locations, the WFID smartphone app used by samplers in the field, has a time-stamp feature, and GPS coordinates that can’t be overridden.

Getting the data is one thing. Then comes the challenge of getting traders, legislators, scientists and timber consumers to embrace science-based wood authentication. WorldForest ID is optimistic about the prospects. “We envisage the day that scientific methods will be used routinely and successfully by timber traders, manufacturers, retailers and law enforcement to accept or reject identity and provenance claims on internationally traded timber and forest products, and to support prosecutions when laws are infringed,” a spokesperson says.

Author: Clare Dowdy, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: ©FSC International / Loa Dalgaard Worm and Kew

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Plant a tree and save the planet; or so we’re told. Well you might be surprised to discover that not all tree planting is good tree planting. A tree planted in the wrong location can block watercourses or provide a wider vantage for predators of endangered species; it can even, in the case of tree-planting in ancient moor and peatlands, release carbon deposits that have safely been stored in the soil for decades, or longer.

“It’s about planting the right trees in the right location to maximise environmental benefits,” says Alice Crosby, Project Officer of a smart tree-planting project in Nidderdale in the Yorkshire Dales, funded by British conservation charity the Woodland Trust. “An example of good planting would be around existing woodlands to create a new space for wildlife to expand their habitats. Poor planting would be in important habitats such as our heathland and moorlands, which already support rare species and contribute significantly to the UK’s targets for carbon sequestration.” In Nidderdale, bad planting has historically opened species of wading birds, such as the endangered curlew, to predation.

With around eight percent tree cover, Nidderdale is typical of British regions in having undergone historical waves of deforestation followed, after the 20th century’s two World Wars, by a programme of replanting of commercial woods such as conifers; with British fuel security, rather than conservation, in view. More recently, tree planting in the region was on landowners’ instigation, with local authorities only stepping in when these projects were on a large scale.

The idea with Nidderdale’s digital Woodland Opportunity Map says Nidderdale Biodiversity Officer Kelly Harmar, is to “flip that process and make it much less passive”. With 70 different factors accounted for, and data drawn from everywhere from grassroots volunteers taking soil samples to Google metrics, the accessible, traffic-light coded online map means Nidderdale can approach landowners, such as private utilities company Yorkshire Water, with the argument for tree-planting in a given spot.

This is where Crosby comes in, her remit being to approach landowners with data on where to plant, as well as advice on how to best withstand the exposed conditions of the Dales. Thanks to hymenoscyphus fraxineus, a chronic fungal disease that’s killing ash trees across the European continent, ash cannot be planted. Beeches, poorly suited to the exposed conditions of the Dales, are overplanted too. Instead Crosby often advises landowners to plant hardy varietals such as the downy birch.

“The idea is to combat climate change but also make the landscape more resilient, meaning that wildlife can thrive and move around more as it’s not impeded by poor tree planting,” Crosby explains.

The beauty of the map’s layered data is that it captures information across the seasons. “If you visit a spot during winter tree-planting season, for example, you wouldn’t know that migratory birds arrive there in summer,” Harmar adds. “A tool like this, that looks at historical data over a number of years, can tease out the sites where ecosystems might be most at risk.”

The team claims that Scandinavian countries such as Finland, with its 60 percent tree cover, much of which is ancient woodland, are their inspiration. Crosby is also documenting the patches of tree cover which are formed of ancient woodland, which has thrived on the same spot for millennia and is host to a range of ancient flora and fauna, including rare fungi, wild garlic and May-blooming bluebell fields. Surprisingly, the locations of these ancient habitats are poorly recorded, even in national archives.

With many of Nidderdale’s mid-war conifer woods approaching their 80-year harvest time, the plan is to replant hardy native species to 12 percent regional forest cover in the next decade, says Harmar. The Woodland Opportunity Map is a big part of this strategy and is being received well. “We only launched the map in October, but the landowners are responding positively and discussing where we might site trees in the next winter planting season,” Crosby says. The project, of course, is only effective if it inspires landowners to plant trees.

Beyond the arguments from data, the team’s loftier hope is to restore Britain’s woodland culture. “British people used to be woodland people and I think we’re rediscovering what we always knew: that forests are great for the planet, but also essential for our mental and physical health,” Crosby says, adding that her favourite forested spot is Hack Fall, where Victorian follies peep between ancient boughs.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Nidderdale AONB Autumn Colours by David Tolcher

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