Q&A Finding new ways of working

BH Wildlife Consultancy and Forestry & Land Scotland were awarded the Innovation & Research Award at the Confor Dinner & Awards 2023. We caught up with Ben Harrower MSc MICFor, Co-Founder of BH Wildlife Consultancy, to talk about their work.

How do you feel about your innovative work being recognised by others in the industry?

Winning this award alongside Forestry & Land Scotland (FLS) was a really big honour and has been a great boost to our business!

We started out offering thermal drone surveys in a full-time capacity last summer, having spent a number of years developing the methodology and systems, and it’s fantastic to be recognised for our work at such an early stage.

Have you learned anything new about the sector while working with FLS?

Conducting drone surveys constantly brings revelations about the UK’s deer population. The density that Muntjac and Fallow deer can appear in is astonishing, and much higher than many of the published studies often suggest.

Sika densities in the west coast of Scotland also flag up hot spots that go undetected when conducting foot counts and helicopter counts, which are inherently geared up for counting Red deer. Our methodologies are constantly being tweaked and developed with two main methods being deployed – a minimum count method and a plot-based approach that is still in the development stage.

How do you see new methods like these changing or impacting the industry?

The new technology is able to give an instant snapshot of a population with high accuracy. Having quick, reliable data is really useful to landowners/managers who have to make the decisions on the ground, often responding quickly to high impacts on woodland caused by browsing.

The maps and imagery from the survey remove conflict by allowing an evidencebased approach to inform decisions backed up by indisputable evidence (all imagery being date/time stamped and geo-referenced). This ability to evidence a minimum population of a given wildlife species makes the job of the landowners/ managers easier to communicate and allows for more cooperative working between organisations and people.

What has been the biggest achievement for BH Wildlife Consultancy so far?

We have been involved in a number of large landscape scale projects this past year that have involved a huge amount of planning, organising and liaising with different groups. The results from these surveys have been really insightful and help to paint a picture of deer and their movements over large areas.

But one of our personal favourites was counting the wallaby population on the Isle of Man – the results showing that there was up to five times the number of wallabies that previously thought to be present. Seeing a field with up to 40 wallabies grazing on it was quite a sight!

What comes next for you?

Going forward we want to continue to develop what we are doing with the drone technology and have expanded our operations across the UK. More organisations and land managers are showing an interest in this relatively new survey method and booking in for the 2023/2024 season.

We are also starting to survey species other than large herbivores and have a few overseas projects later this year that we are very excited about. There is also a lot of interest in using the same technology to find the rarest animals as opposed to counting the most abundant, so we are also going to be exploring that further this coming season.

The Innovation & Research Award 2023 was sponsored by Forestry & Land Scotland and Forestry Commission.

Gresham House appointed as asset manager to Irish forests

Gresham House Asset Management has been appointed by AXA Investment Managers as the exclusive asset manager to a 4,074-hectare portfolio of mature Irish forests on a long-term contract.

The scope of the forest land, which is historically very large by UK and Irish standards, is divided across 185 estates throughout Ireland. Comprising one of Europe’s fastest growing wood types and the main and most valuable commercial conifer species in Ireland and the

UK, it benefits from good local infrastructure and proximity to a number of sawmills.

With an existing portfolio of real assets ranging from renewables, infrastructure and forestry, Gresham House is the UK’s largest commercial forestry manager, harvesting circa 10% of the UK’s total softwood annually. Following this major appointment, it will manage over 129,000 hectares of forests on behalf of institutions, endowments, family offices and private investors.

Tony Dalwood, Chief Executive Officer of Gresham House, said: “The strategic rationale for this partnership, alongside the potential financial returns, are clear and exciting for Gresham House. As the UK’s largest private forestry investment manager, this portfolio marks the first step in our ambition to develop a long-term international business platform, increasing assets under management across a wide array of real asset investments.”