OPAL Tree Health Survey

Oak

A slightly different blog from me today…..In my day job, I’m lucky enough to work for a project called the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) project which is run by the Natural History Museum and Imperial College London.

OPAL is a ‘citizen science’ project, which aims to get people outdoors and involved in scientific research. So this got me thinking that OPAL might be a project that the keen gardeners of Seed Parade might be interested in getting involved with!

We launched our national tree health survey today and this runs from May to September when trees are in leaf. As trees are so important for bringing nature into urban areas and providing food and habitats for wildlife, I thought this might appeal to my fellow gardeners out there!

The survey takes about 30 minutes to complete and involves a couple of simple activities like identifying trees, measuring their girth and height, examining the trunk, branches and leaves for signs of poor health and recording the presence of pests and diseases.

OPAL hope that the survey will help scientists to build up a picture of the health of Britain’s most common trees. Reporting any pests or diseases will also help scientists to understand their distribution, how they interact together, and how their impact varies from one year to the next.

If you’d like to find out more about the survey or would like to take part, then have a look at the OPAL website

That’s it for me for now, back to gardening next time, I promise!

 

See also  Pollination in the greenhouse
Helene Coleman
Along with my partner Steve, I am a complete novice vegetable gardener. We took on an allotment for the first time this year and apart from our courgettes, most things were a bit of a disaster... We've decided to up our game and try and learn a thing or two about growing veg by blogging about our growing anxieties, triumphs and failures, supplemented with a few ideas on what we will cook with our allotment produce.

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