We were blessed with sunshine and heat last weekend for the start of our annual Carbon Study Spruce Up. Much more than a lick of paint, this is a spruce up that helps us maintain the integrity of our field trial at Glandwr Forest and we are grateful for the effort of our community science volunteers who join us each year to help with this important work.
Nestled in Glandwr Forest is a unique research project looking at the impact of enhanced rock weathering and soil microbiome inoculation on reforestation in both broadleaf and conifer forests. The study aims to understand how these techniques can accelerate tree growth, enhance soil biodiversity, improve tree resilience, and remove more carbon from the atmosphere.
This is a large-scale field trial involving 25,600 trees and covering 11.5 hectares, the equivalent of 18 football pitches. Why so many trees? Curiosity! There are a lot of variations in the study, starting with two types of forests – broadleaf and conifer. For each forest type the study is investigating two nature-based treatments – enhanced rock weathering and soil microbiome inoculation – both on their own and in combination. The result is a test cell for each of these eight variations, plus a grassland control where no trees have been planted.
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The size of the study was determined by the statistical power needed to ensure a sufficient number of trees for each variation to be able to detect meaningful effects, if they are present.
Breaking it down, the study is divided into blocks of 3,200 trees. Each block has eight test plots of 400 trees each covering one of the variations being studied, plus a grassland control. The magic number is eight and there are eight of these blocks spread across the site resulting in 72 test plots and enabling the replication needed for this large, careful piece of science.
Bringing the Glandwr Forest Carbon Study to life required mapping out each test plot on the ground, carefully marked out with numbered corner posts. This is where our ‘spruce up’ begins; checking the corner posts, replacing them where needed, and bumping any wobbly posts back into the ground. From the corners we then move to the middle of the plot, identified with a colour-coded centre post which we repaint every year.
These colourful markers help us to find the one hundred trees at the heart of each test plot which are identified with aluminium tags etched with a unique bar code and attached to a stake. These bar codes are used every October in our Big Tree Measure to scan and identify 6,400 trees. To ensure that we do not lose any of these precious tags, the final stage of the spruce up involves checking every stake and replacing them where needed. So far this year we have needed to replace about 3% of the stakes, ensuring that these special trees are easy to identify and remain part of our measurement program.
A big thank you to everyone who has helped with our Spruce Up so far this year.
This is much more than a lick of paint!
