The impacts of long-term woodland creation on invertebrate communities

Many countries are setting ambitious targets for habitat restoration and woodland expansion (e.g. Bonn Challenge), such as England's commitment to plant 11 million trees by 2022 and to restore 75% of protected sites to favourable condition (Defra2018). To ensure these efforts help to reduce biodiversity decline and restore ecosystem functioning in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as climate change, they need to be strategic.

In this project, the student will examine changes in invertebrate communities resulting from woodland creation utilising new and existing data collected under the WrEN project experimental platform. Specifically, we will address the followingquestions:1. What is the relative importance of local (e.g. patch size, age since establishment)vs. landscape-scale (e.g. amount and configuration of surrounding habitat)attributes in the development of invertebrate communities in secondary woodlands?2. What are the key drivers of functional diversity in woodland invertebratecommunities?3. How predictable is the trajectory of invertebrate community development as woodlands mature, i.e. are communities in secondary woodlands simply subsets of those found at older sites, or could they be considered novel assemblages?4. How do species functional characteristics, including dispersal and habitat specificity, act to limit colonisation, and what impact does this have on long term functional diversity and trophic complexity?