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Wytham's one of the few places
in the world where the first ecologists, a century ago,
began to formulate their theories of how ecosystems work,
how plants and animals interact
and that has led to a rich history
of understanding and insight from Wytham
that has gone on to feed into our understanding
of ecology of the planet as a whole.
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- We try to establish the carbon budget of the whole forest.
So the ultimate aim is that we would understand
how much carbon we have currently stored
in the trees and in the soil,
but also, how much carbon is coming in
when the trees grow and how much carbon
is going out when dead things decompose.
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- [Yadvinder Mahli] Our aim is to both understand
Wytham in itself, but also, to use Wytham
as a node of a global network of sites,
where we do these types of measurements
and it sets our local European node.
One other part of the work we're doing at Wytham
is trying to understand how much of the forest ecology
and function we can map from above the forest,
either by aircraft, or ultimately, by satellites
and we do this by, firstly, from the towers and the walkways
we put up sensors to try and monitor the forest canopy.
Over this year, we're going to be flying aircraft
over Wytham with both lasers that will bounce off the forest
and measure the structure of the forest in exquisite detail.
And at the same time, with a type of sensor
called a Hyperspectral Sensor,
that measures hundreds of different wavelengths of light.
And from that, in principle,
you can actually work out the chemistry of every tree
that you're looking at.
The reason we do this work is ultimately to see
to what extent can we map the functioning
of the biosphere, the health of the biosphere
at a larger scale?
(leaves rustling)
- [Terhi Riutta] My research group has similar plots
all over tropical countries.
So I also work in Borneo and lots of my colleagues
work in the Andes, and in the Amazon region and also
in Africa. Obviously the working conditions here are really
easy, so you can just cycle from Oxford and then spend a day
here and think of back home at the end of the day.
In Borneo, we do have snakes and we do have lots of leeches
and they are those land leeches
so they are all over the forest floor.
But Wytham is not a sleepy little place,
we have stinging nettles and mosquitoes, bramble. (laughing)
Yeah, it doesn't really compare to the tropics.
- [Yadvinder Mahli] I think one thing that over the years
I've come to appreciate more and more
is how much the woodland is changing all the time.
We look at this and we may imagine that the Wytham
a decade ago looked the same, or five decades ago,
or a century ago, it looked more or less the same - that
somehow woodlands are timeless
when the world around is changing.
But what we've come to see from the richness
of the historical record of Wytham is that
these woodlands have completely transformed decade on
decade. But we also need to worry about human impact
on the forest. The sheer number and intensity of people
altering the landscape is much larger
than anything in human history
and so the pressure we're putting
on to naturally ecosystems is also much greater.
I think, through my research,
I've come to see forests in some different ways.
I often see them as cycles and rhythms of processes,
so of flows, of carbon and nutrients and water.
So I think what a scientific guy can do
is give you new glasses to look at nature.
The more you understand the delicious complexity
of the forest and the processes going on
beyond your immediate vision,
the more you can come to love and appreciate the forest.
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