Rachel and I managed to find each other at Alvaston Park and walked over to the Tiny Forest. There we met Helen, and Reg from Trees for Derby who were already getting stuck in.

The recent warmer and wet weather seems to have helped the Tiny Forest grow, so there were a lot of weeds growing and the paths could barely be seen when we arrived.

The weather forecast turned out to be accurate so despite a dry start we were in a downpour by the end. But raincoats were put on and progress was made. The paths are more visible and the trees have more space to continue growing.

I am looking forward to getting back on future missions to continue caring for the site.

Foxwell Drive's Tiny Forest was planted on 28 January 2021 by local contractors (in line with Covid restrictions). It is a curved shape that follows the road and is adjacent to the A40. It's had a few years to get established now, and many of the trees are thriving. Unfortunately a lot of nettles, brambles and other plants are also thriving and choking/competing with the trees.

We were called in for a two-pronged task - to clear around the trees to give them more chance of continuing to thrive and to uncover the tags needed for monitoring. Once we'd cleared a good area we then pivoted to some of the monitoring surveys - taking measurements of the tagged trees (and each others' ears for some reason!), and then doing a grounddwellers count to finish off.

Our very own Lorenzo is a volunteer with Tiny Forests and so has a monitoring kit, so hopefully we can independently head out for some monintoring surveys another time. We only have 1 more Tiny Forest in Oxford which we haven't visited yet, so let's head to Meadow Lane soon!

Congratulations to Anna on completing her 50th Good Deed!

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.