The Centre for Forest Protection was well represented at the IUFRO World Congress 2024 in Stockholm at the end of June. The congress was the largest ever with over 4300 delegates and 30 parallel scientific sessions to choose from at times.
“Fantastic opportunity to meet a number of past, existing and potential future collaborators in just a few days. Updating people in person this way beats any social media efforts”. Dr Rubén Manso
“IUFRO was my first experience of an international conference. It was both welcoming and inspiring. It’s incredible to hear about the different methods forest researchers have developed to tackle problems that we all face, and also to learn about entirely new initiatives. Best of all I was able to discuss my research topic with experts from around the world and gain their perspectives on my work.” Fritha West.
“It was a great opportunity to gain insight into international forestry practices and to talk to people from different organisations and to Forest Research colleagues in a different setting. It was a challenge to communicate a meaningful amount of information in just three minutes with a short poster presentation, but I did get engaged in an interesting conversation with a researcher from Iceland, as a result of my talk.” Thomas Baer
We presented our projects on pinewood nematode, acute oak decline, ash dieback, birch adaptation to the environment and drought in Sitka spruce. The Centre for Forest Protection team were part of a wider group of colleagues from Forest Research, Kew and our collaborators at CEH.
“This was the first time I had been to the IUFRO conference – there was a very interesting breadth of talks and posters. It was great to meet up with other people working on ash genomics in particular, and there is definitely scope for collaboration in the future. I presented a talk on the CFP ash pangenome project, and it was very useful to get people’s feedback and see how the project fitted in with other research going on in the field.” Dr Daniel Wood.