Centre for Forest Protection Blog

This National Tree Week, PhD student, Fritha, tells us about the work she and CFP intern Jack are doing to discover attitudes to elm restoration – who cares, why they care and what we can do about it. They would love to see you at one of their workshops.

Centre for Forest Protection researchers had the opportunity to present work at the enormous IUFRO World Congress 2024. Find out what they made of it.

PhD student Jiaqi tells us about her work investigating potential impacts on British trees of a bacterial disease that is causing major problems for crop growers across the world.

Phoebe tells us what she got up to during her internship at Kew.

Read about Sian’s six months as a Centre for Forest Protection intern.

Find out about what our intern Eve got up to on her six month Centre for Forest Protection placement with Forest Research.

Our interns had an exciting week. They presented their projects to our science teams and then had two days of visits to find out more about research at Kew and Forest Research. They were joined at the Forest Research tour by three of our Postdoctoral Researchers from Kew wanting to find out more about their partner organisation in the Centre for Forest Protection.

University of Southampton and Centre for Forest Protection PhD student Alexandra Ash is investigating the bark-stripping behaviour of grey squirrels to identify future methods to prevent tree damage. Alexandra tells us about the challenges of navigating problem-solving in the field to develop the best experimental set-up for feeding trials.

Researchers Nikki Cotterill from Forest Research, and Guillermo Friis from Kew tell us about their fieldwork this spring and summer. They have been sampling trees for genomic analysis and assessing tree health in naturally colonised and planted woodlands.

Dr Daniel Wood, a Centre for Forest Protection Postdoctoral Research Associate is working on our ash pangenome project. A few years ago, Kew Scientists and QMUL produced the first reference genome for the ash tree. Daniel has been working on improving this genome, and the team have recently released this new reference genome for use by scientists. Here, he explains what a reference genome is, how it is used and why we need to update it for our work on ash dieback.

Nicola made a video diary of her fieldwork

Alice tells us about her experiences of fieldwork and data analysis

Alice tells us about what she learnt during her CFP internship at Kew

Find out about Camila’s experience as a CFP intern

Find out about Freya’s experience as a CFP intern.

Researcher Mohammad has been exploring the Kew Fungarium to find out more about the life-cycle of the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease.

CFP Education and Training Officer, Suzanne Sancisi-Frey, tells us about the first CFP internship programme