The UK Treescapes Ambassador Team is multidisciplinary and brings extensive experience across a range of fields allowing effective and expert programme coordination.
The role of the Ambassador Team is to help develop a genuinely interdisciplinary research community capable of working across the natural, economic and social sciences, and the arts and humanities. The team works with projects funded under the UK Treescapes Programme, organises conferences, workshops and webinars to share knowledge, and synthesises the outputs from across the programme into rich media content for wider stakeholder audiences. Read more about individual team members below.
If you would like to contact our team, you can email us at: treescapes@glos.ac.uk
Future of UK Treescapes programme Ambassador Julie Urquhart is an Associate Professor at the Countryside & Community Research Institute. Her academic background spans the remits of the three research councils funding this programme. While her roots are in environmental science, her work integrates environmental social science and human geography, as well as research collaborations with arts’ scholars. As an interdisciplinarian, Julie has over 15 years’ experience in research relating to the sustainability of trees, forests and woodlands, with work that spans the public goods and ecosystem services associated with trees and forests through to the social dimensions of tree health. Much of her work has an applied policy focus, and she has worked closely with Defra and Forest Research over many years.
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Alice Goodenough is Programme Manager for the Future of UK Treescapes programme. For over 10 years, she has been exploring and writing about the health and wellbeing benefits of spending time in woods and forests and previously coordinated the Good from Woods research project. Working with a wide range of organisations to evaluate the impacts and outcomes of their work in green and woodland environments, her focus has frequently been the co-design of interdisciplinary and creative research approaches to exploring these.
Abbie Stone is the Communications and Knowledge Exchange Officer for the Future of UK Treescapes UK Treescapes. She has over ten years of communications experience working with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory and the Grantham Institute before joining the UK Treescapes Programme and CCRI. Abbie has a wealth of experience across various communications activities from engaging with policymakers, liaising with the media and working with the public on collaborative projects.
She has a BSc in Physics from the University of Surrey and an MA in Acting from East 15. She brings creativity and technical understanding to the forefront of her communications work. She focuses on delivering the events, social media and communications outputs for the programme.
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Gill Tavner is a Research Assistant and Programme Officer for the Future of UK Treescapes within the Countryside and Community Research Institute. After over twenty years of English teaching and education management, Gill completed an MSc in Society, Politics and Climate Change at the University of Bristol. Gill is interested in political ecology, conservation and the commons with a particular focus on community and sense of place. Her most recent research was among Welsh hill farmers, exploring the sociological challenges to woodland creation on common land in SE Wales.
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Clive Potter is Professor of Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and was a Future of UK Treescapes programme Ambassador until December 2023. An environmental social scientist with research interests in sustainable land use and forestry, Clive has published widely on the policy challenges facing the UK’s trees, woods and forests. He has led a series of research projects investigating the risks to tree health from introduced pests and diseases, together with the policy, institutional and behavioural changes that will be needed to safeguard our treescapes. He was a member of Defra’s Tree Health and Plant Biosecurity Taskforce in 2013 and has been a member of the Forestry Commission’s Expert Science committee since 2017.