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Biography: Guy Shrubsole is an environmental campaigner and author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain (William Collins, 2022), which won the Wainwright Prize for writing on conservation. His other books include Who Owns England? (2019) and The Lie of the Land (2024). Guy has campaigned on climate change and nature loss for the past 15 years, working for organisations from Friends of the Earth and Rewilding Britain, to DEFRA and the Right to Roam campaign.

Talk: Guy will explore progress towards temperate rainforest restoration since he wrote The Lost Rainforests of Britain, overviewing some of the political momentum behind the cause (as well as policy blockages!) and the spread of practical restoration projects.

Biography: Michelle Connolly has a background in disturbance ecology and lives near one of the world’s only inland temperate rainforests, in Prince George, British Columbia. She runs a volunteer group in central BC called Conservation North, which focuses on public education and advocacy for the enduring protection of primary forests. In her professional life she works with Indigenous communities on forest stewardship and protection.

Talk: Inland Temperate Rainforest: ecology, threats and opportunities

Biography: Katerina is a third (and final) year PhD student, based at University College Cork in Ireland, with a background in environmental science and policy from University College Dublin. Her PhD focuses on Atlantic oak restoration in Ireland and Britain and is in collaboration with the Â鶹´«Ã½, with her supervisory team made up of Dr Markus Eichhorn and Dr Mary O’Shaughnessy in Cork, and Dr Thomas Murphy and Dr James Buckley in Â鶹´«Ã½. Her project, ‘Restoring Atlantic Oak Forests: Strategies and Perceptions in Ireland and Britain’, aims to bring together the ecological side of restoration with the social science perspective to find feasible pathways to the restoration and expansion of this temperate rainforest habitat, that are actionable on the ground and sustainable in the long term. Her work therefore spans from climate envelope mapping to fieldwork assessments to interviews with key informants and student surveys.

Katerina also co-authored the first State of Temperate Rainforest Report for the South West Rainforest Alliance, acting as the GIS specialist who created the maps of temperate rainforest distribution and restoration potential used for the report. The restoration potential map she created for South West England is now to be further expanded to other parts of England and the UK.

Biographies: Joe Beesley is a Spatial Scientist at Forest Research with an interest in woodland ecology, natural processes and spatial modelling. Fiona Plenderleith is a Spatial Scientist in Forest Research with expertise in woodland connectivity, climate change impacts and species modelling.

Talk: Mapping, assessing and expanding Britain’s temperate rainforests

An introduction to a new research project which aims to identify future temperate rainforest zones and understand lichen colonisation under climate change. This Defra funded project is a collaboration between Forest Research, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Â鶹´«Ã½.

Biography: Chris Ellis is Head of Conservation Science at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He is an ecologist with a particular interest in lichen epiphytes and their contribution to temperate rainforest biodiversity. His research seeks to understand the lichen epiphyte response to pressures including climate change, pollution and tree disease, aiming to identify practical actions that can be implemented at local scales to offset the global change risk to biodiversity.

Talk: Temperate rainforest is limited to a set of globally rare climatic conditions. However, the species that characterise temperate rainforest, including lichen epiphytes, experience this climate at very small microhabitat scales. This makes it challenging to understand how temperate rainforest species might be impacted by climate change.

An example will be provided of microclimatic modelling that can be used to assess the resilience of temperate rainforest biodiversity to climate change scenarios, by measuring the distance over which a species must disperse to locate suitable microclimates through to 2080. Can species make the jump to their microclimatic refugia?