Sentinel Treescapes for Plant Biosecurity and Risk Management - Multiple Threats

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Trees play an essential role in sustaining life, providing wildlife habitats and timber and storing carbon, helping to reduce climate change. Tree cover accounts for around 17% of the land area of Great Britain, but trees across the UK landscape, in both woodlands and urban or agricultural environments (the 'treescape'), are currently at risk due to a range of pests and diseases, many of which result in eventual tree death or cause safety hazards due to dead hanging branches or increased risk of tree fall. For example, ash dieback, a disease which arrived in the UK in 2012, could lead to the loss of 90% of the UK's ash trees, currently one of the most common broadleaf species. This project will work with key partners with responsibility for managing trees or ensuring public safety, including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Network Rail and Norfolk County Council, to develop a monitoring system, which can ultimately be established across the UK treescape, in locations likely to provide an early warning of pest and disease spread (such as near ports or along roads and railways), or of importance for conservation, cultural reasons or public safety, to provide a 'sentinel' system of changes in the health of trees. The monitoring system, to be deployed in Norfolk, UK, will combine observations from sensors attached to individual trees in the landscape (measuring the condition of the tree canopy, movement of water, tree growth and the motion of the trunk as an indicator of risk of tree fall) with visual observations of tree health made by networks of voluntary 'citizen scientists', including current Tree Council Tree Wardens. Images obtained from cameras on drones and satellites will be used to expand the observations across a wider area and modelling methods will be used to combine the data from these different sources to estimate tree health and detect changes. A web-based interface will be developed to provide both volunteers and partners with accessible and easily interpreted information from sensors and models, and the experiences of volunteers of working with the technology will be explored through workshops. Models will also be developed to explore the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of different designs of sensor networks and to identify the ideal combinations of and distribution of sensors and observations for future use in monitoring larger areas and more locations. Workshops with partners and other interested stakeholders (e.g. forestry industry representatives or conservation organisations) will be used to examine the best ways in which sensor technology and model outputs can be communicated and the role such data can play in the decision-making processes. The demonstration network, representing a digital environment for tree health assessment and monitoring, will provide a blueprint for future deployment throughout the UK, leading to improved understanding of the spread of pests and diseases and better management of trees.