Big Tree Measure 2024 is complete! A big thank you to everyone who has helped us measure 6,400 trees in The Carbon Community’s carbon study. An incredible achievement over 9 days with lots of new faces and many citizen science volunteers who return year after year. New and old, the first question is almost always, “How tall are the trees?”
It is magical to watch the trees grow, some of the pioneer species are now over five metres tall and in many of the broadleaf areas the canopy has started to close. As always, nature continues to keep us on our toes and bigger trees required new measuring equipment as well as updates to our data recording app where volunteers record the height, diameter at 1.3 metres (also known as “diameter at breast height” and used in a formula to calculate the overall carbon captured in larger trees) and diameter at base.
Measuring the trees is an important component of our carbon study which involves 25,600 trees planted across 28 acres. This large-scale field-trial looks at two types of forest, broadleaf and conifer, and two nature-based approaches, enhanced rock weathering and soil microbiome rewilding which are studied both individually and in combination. The result is eight test cells plus a grassland control replicated eight times across the site. Each test cell contains four hundred trees of which one hundred trees are individually tracked with a unique bar-code.
The study was designed together with leading researchers from Imperial College, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The University of Sheffield and the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich. Since the start of the project in 2021, researchers have been working to measure changes in the mycorrhizal fungi colonisation, soil carbon, tree growth and tree resilience with the aim to understand the impact of these techniques on overall forest ecosystem carbon.
Bringing together researchers and community scientists is one of the joys of our annual Big Tree Measure.
“This is the cutting edge of climate science, we are so grateful for all of the people who have come help us measure the trees and take care of this land.” Kat Clayton, Imperial College.
Measuring 6,400 trees is a BIG undertaking that takes a community. This year there were 113 individuals who contributed 167 days of people power!
There are many reasons why people join the Big Tree Measure - time spent outdoors, meeting like-minded people, and learning new skills. Most of all, people join us because they care about climate and nature and want to make a personal contribution to environment research.
A quote from one of our volunteers:
“Volunteering with The Carbon Community gives me a chance that I wouldn’t normally have to play a small part in contributing to environmental science. I feel privileged to help in a small way towards a scientific study and to do what I love most which is being outdoors and meeting people who share the interests and passion as I do about the future.”
To everyone who helped make the Big Tree Measure 2024 possible, Thank You.
