Grantee: Knoydart Forest Trust

Duration:  6 months (May 2025 – November 2025)

 

Background

Native woodland in the Highlands and Islands struggles to regenerate naturally, largely due to overgrazing by high deer populations. Restoring habitats at a landscape scale requires strategic interventions over decades.

The Project

Knoydart, a remote peninsula accessible only by boat or foot, is an exemplar of community land ownership. The Knoydart Forest Trust now manages woodland across the 7,000 hectare community-owned estate. Over the last 26 years, they have delivered a number of woodland creation schemes, planting over 750,000 trees and creating in excess of 855 hectares of new native woodland.

The Trust, in partnership with the Knoydart Foundation, are currently developing the Knoydart Credit project, exploring how natural capital (the elements of the natural environment that provide valuable goods and services to society) could be harnessed to regenerate both land and community.

The ‘Wild Trees Survey’ will form a crucial part of this wider project. Through a partnership with leading rewilding charity Trees for Life, the survey will identify the potential for ecological recovery and habitat regeneration, and prioritise and plan future activities.

The methodology will identify potential woodland refuges in the landscape, create high and low density monitoring plots and watercourse transects to assess the presence and abundance of naturally regenerating tree species and diversity hotspots, and ascertain ecosystem health and resilience. With a great deal of restoration work already underway, it will also help to monitor how the ecosystem is recovering whilst establishing a baseline for measuring further change. Crucially, the project will build capacity locally through training the Knoydart Forest Trust and Knoydart Foundation local team, and engaging the wider community through direct involvement.

This strategic approach will enable long term ecological restoration, while also informing community-led natural capital approaches.