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The Carbon Community started with a question: How can you accelerate carbon capture in a forest? From this question, a unique collaboration was born, and a forest was created with a field trial at its heart.
“The Glandwr Forest Carbon Study has been a genuine collaboration between the scientists working on the project, The Carbon Community, and the citizen science volunteers. 2025 marks the fifth year of the project, and a significant scientific milestone. At last, enough time has elapsed for us to rigorously quantify changes in carbon held belowground - in the roots and in the soil. When we combine these data with the tree measurements you have collected, we will obtain the first holistic picture of how our treatments are impacting ecosystem carbon capture.”
Bonnie Waring, Associate Professor of Ecosystems Ecology, Imperial College London
2025 marked a major milestone for the Glandwr Forest Carbon Study. Now that enough time has elapsed, researchers from Imperial College London have been able to collect samples to help assess carbon sequestration belowground.
Aboveground milestones were also reached with the fifth year of The CarbonCommunity’s Big Tree Measure, when citizen scientists join us to take the measurements of 6,400 trees. After five years, we have now measured 32,000 trees and taken almost 100,000 measurements.
Why so many? This is a large-scale field trial designed with replication to allow for statistical robustness. The field trial spans 11.5 hectares, or roughly 18 football pitches, looking at both conifer (Sitka spruce) and mixed native broadleaf planting with two nature-based treatments - enhanced rock weathering and soil microbiome enrichment. There are eight test cells plus a grassland control replicated 8 times across the site. The result - 72 test cells and 25,600 trees, of which 6,400 have a unique barcode.
Maintaining the integrity on-the-ground of a field experiment of this scale is a major undertaking. Each year, volunteers join us for the “Carbon Study Spruce Up” to check that barcodes are intact, replace broken stakes and ensure plot boundaries are clear.
We are often asked, When are the results going to be published? Initial aboveground findings are currently undergoing peer review, a reassuringly rigorous process.
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Who remembers the yellow backpacks and geo-positioning the trees?
In 2023, The Carbon Community, in collaboration with Swansea University, received a Woodlands Into Management Forestry Innovation Fund (WIMFIF) grant from the Forestry Commission to look at ‘drone based measurement and verification of standing timber and carbon volumes’.
Bringing together the unique combination of citizen scientists from The Carbon Community and researchers from Swansea University, this innovative project has been able to correlate results between on-the-ground measurements and drone overflight of 6,400 trees. Demonstrating reliable links between drone data and field plots helps to lay foundations for robust, scalable MRV systems that can support high‑integrity carbon projects.
The research was completed in March 2025 and we look forward to sharing the findings when published.
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Glandwr Forest is increasingly recognised as a field site where students and researchers can explore fundamental and applied questions about forests, soils and climate. In 2025, researchers and PhD students from Imperial College London, The University of Sheffield, and Swansea University were collecting data at Glandwr Forest.
Visits from students continued to grow. Swansea University’s Department of Geography continued its long-term partnership with The Carbon Community, with academics and Master’s students returning for a fifth consecutive year to join Big Tree Measure. Black Mountains College returned for the second year, learning how a long‑term research trial operates in a working landscape.
The size, scale and layout of the carbon study have created a facility for long-term research on forest carbon sequestration. With the grassland areas, hedgerows and peat, there is even more potential for integrated research.
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Reaching the fifth year of the carbon study and the fifth Big Tree Measure is a significant milestone, but also a starting point for the decades of work that meaningful forest research and restoration require. The data, skills and relationships built so far position The Carbon Community to continue pushing the frontiers of research while nurturing a forest where people, science and wildlife can all flourish.
If you would like to find out more about the Glandwr Forest facility or how to support our work, get in touch at info@carboncommunity.org or find out more about our current fundraising.
