Small but Mighty

17 Goodgymers helped their local community in Oxford
Ellie Evans
Anwen Greenaway
Trevor
Axelle
Sarah McFadden
Venetia Lipscombe
Sophie Wilkinson
Anja
Henry Gibson
Fred Collman
Charlie Lay
Mark Soave
Oliver
Imogen Pierce
Theresa Joseph
1 / 41
Oxford

Wednesday 12th July 2023

Credits
Anwen Greenaway
Anwen Greenaway

SESSION ORGANISER

Trevor
Trevor

PHOTOGRAPHER

Axelle
Axelle

PHOTOGRAPHER

Oxford runner

PHOTOGRAPHER

Find out about GoodGym TaskForce

Report written by Anwen Greenaway

Share the love

Tiny Forest brings the benefits of woodland right into the heart of our cities and urban spaces: connecting people with nature, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as providing nature-rich habitat to support urban wildlife.

Earthwatch is pioneering Tiny Forest in the UK and is conducting a UK-wide research study to help us understand how these super tiny woods have the potential to be super powerful.

Last night Earthwatch Europe launched their Lottery funded partnership with GoodGym at the Littlemore Tiny Forest.

A couple of years ago 600 saplings were planted in a patch of ground 200 metres square (roughly the size of a tennis court), and the plot is now a lovely baby woodland at the end of a wild flower patch.

Earthwatch are collecting data on biodiversity, carbon storage, flood mitigation and thermal comfort in the Tiny Forest in order to see how the scheme could help in urban areas. 100 of the 600 trees in the Littlemore Tiny Forest have been tagged to be regularly monitored, and these were the main focus of our citizen science.

Dividing into trios we made our way around the site checking that the trees were correctly identified in the database, measuring height and girth, and counting the number of stems for multi-stem trees. It turned out to be a very satisfying task - particularly tracking down the last few elusive tagged trees! We managed to find and monitor 58 trees in under an hour.

Other experiments made observations on water soak away and thermal comfort. Tracking the changes over the next few years will be very interesting.

Welcome to GoodGym Mark and Jac. Great to have a visitor from the central team Theresa.


This task supported
EarthWatch Europe
Creating Knowledge. Inspiring Action

registered charity 1094467 (England & Wales branch)

See more

Discuss this report
Theresa Joseph
Theresa Joseph (she/her)

Thu 13th Jul 2023 at 3:06pm

Lovely to see you all - Thank you for the warm welcome

Daniel Mermelstein

Sun 16th Jul 2023 at 1:07pm

Fantastic stuff! Glad to see so many goodgymers getting involved with tiny forests!

Jack

Tue 18th Jul 2023 at 11:04am

well done all, great work

Join us on our next session

Oxford

St Nicholas' Primary School gardening
🗓Wednesday 3rd September 6:00pm

Forest School clear up

+3
EmmaMuireannKatie FellowsVicky ArnoldAnwen Greenaway
8 GoodGymers are going