Future Treescapes in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty: Expansion and Resilience in the Chiltern Hills and Beyond

'Future Treescapes in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty' is a collaborative project that brings together the work of agricultural researchers, landscape professionals, national agencies, and local stakeholders to focus on a distinctive protected landscape: the Chiltern Hills.

As in other UK AONBs, one of the area's defining features is its treescape, which is made up most characteristically of beech woodland, but includes the UK's largest coverage of native box. 88% of the Chilterns' designated priority habitats are deciduous woodland, and of the 17,588 woodland hectares within its boundaries 9,830ha (59%) are ancient.
There are immediate opportunities to support the expansion of these woodlands through the planned extension of the AONB's boundaries (Natural England statutory consultation, 2024). 'Future of UK Treescapes' has three key themes: understanding holistically the form, value and function of UK woodland; exploring barriers and pathways towards its expansion; increasing the resilience of UK treescapes to global pressures. All three are currently of urgent significance to the Chilterns.
For FTAONB, treescape investigators from the University of Reading have joined with the Chilterns Conservation Board to co-design a programme of knowledge exchange around these pressing challenges and opportunities.

Their plan centres on a series of workshops at which both partners will introduce their wider circles of collaborators to a newly extended network of treescape researchers, landscape practitioners, and conservation/NGO professionals. The exchange of knowledge at these workshops will be broadened further, crucially, through FTAONB's consultation with hard-to-reach professionals in the agricultural and land management sectors, upon whose involvement the larger agendas of the project ultimately depend. The project is designed, furthermore, so that its landscape-specific identification of knowledge requirements and research provisions can be scaled up from the local context of the Chilterns to the larger, national context of the other 45 UK AONBs.

The FTAONB project team will produce a series of statement documents and information tools at each of its collaborative stages, using an iterative process of composition, consultation and revision. Stage 1 will produce an initial research needs statement, followed by practice notes from the first workshop, elaborated into an attractive and impactful infographic document. At Stage 2 we will deploy the infographic practice notes in consultations with local stakeholders (facilitated by the CCB through their farm cluster programme), and seek to revise and extend them in the light of these conversations. At Stage 3 we will assess the scope for scaling up the practice notes to more general UK treescape contexts, finally prototyping a toolkit document of UK Treescape research applications. This toolkit will form the centrepiece of a searchable, online knowledge hub, containing educational materials on the expansion and preservation of UK treescapes, to be hosted on the Tree Council website.
For the CCB, the legacy of its work on FTAONB is the material that it will feed into the Chilterns AONB 2025-2030 management plan, and the foundations it will lay for a new Chilterns Woodland Strategy document.